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Stopping SPAM - Unsolicited Commercial EMail

At present, there is no way to completely eliminate all SPAM from your EMail. Sadly, once you're on one SPAMmer's list, you're likely to eventually be on dozens of them as the mailing lists are sold and resold. At best, you can set your EMail program to filter out the most obvious ones for pornographic sites and get-rich-quick pitches. And Internet Service Providers are employing new tools to filter SPAM before it ever reaches you. But some SPAM is bound to get through. I've made a list of some elementary things you can do to reduce your vulnerability to SPAM.

  1. Write off your current EMail address as your primary mailbox. Think of it as toxic waste. You just need to take care that it doesn't spread contamination to your new EMail address (see item #2). You will have to spend an ungodly long time changing over to a new address, but you will be compensated for the time and effort by having changed your old SPAM-filled EMail account into a throw-away EMail address that you can use to sign up on websites, make purchases online, and do other things that reveal your EMail address to people who would abuse it. You only need to monitor this mailbox often enough to dump the excess SPAM and retrieve the messages you know will be coming from online stores and websites you've "joined" that require you to receive your password by EMail.

  2. Create a new EMail Account for your most private use and guard it dearly. I recommend Yahoo! Mail because it offers built-in anti-SPAM software that works through the efforts of the community. When one user declares a message to be SPAM, the system helps block that message from others. Another nice aspect is that you can access your mail from anywhere you have Internet access, complete with an Address book and message storage facility. They offer both a free and a low-cost subscription version of their mail system. The free version is ample for common correspondence, but if you like to keep your EMail on file using the EMail program on your computer, you have to use the subscription service.

  3. Never use your new private EMail address to buy anything, to fill in a form anywhere online, or to post a message in an online Forum, bulletin board or Usenet Newsgroup message. And if you operate a website, do not post your EMail address anywhere on your webpages. Use a <form> to allow people to contact you. If you must post your EMail address on a webpage, obscure it using JavaScript. See HotScripts.com for details.

  4. If you operate a website, use an anonymizing service to prevent your name, mailing address, EMail address, and other information from being posted online. Services like RegisterFly.com will give you this layer of privacy for a small additional charge over and above the cost of domain name registration.
  5. Set your EMail program to disable displaying pictures. This will prevent SPAMmers from knowing that you opened one of their EMails, thus informing them that the EMail address they used to reach you is valid.

  6. Never click on the "opt-out" link in a SPAM EMail. It only lets them know that your EMail address is valid and read.

  7. Disable the Preview function in Outlook Express. Same reason as above.

  8. Use the anti-SPAM filter in your EMail program. All of them have filtering capabilities. Take the time to learn yours. Its really simple. Just enter the most common buzzwords: the popular euphamisms for body parts, "Viagra," "mortgage," loans," "discount," "porn," "Nigeria," etc. The program will then automatically either delete the message or send it to a special holding-area mailbox so you can examine it later.

  9. Buy and use commercial anti-SPAM software for your EMail program. Two years ago I would have told you that these programs are a waste of time and money because they were overpriced, performed poorly, and had some compatibility problems, but these packages have been significantly improved lately. Built-in filters tend to catch about 10-30% of SPAM because SPAMmers are increasingly clever about disguising these keywords in their messages. The commercial programs can trap well over 50% for most people. These programs work in much the same way as the built-in filters, but they have more sophisticated analysis algorithms that allow them to catch more SPAM. The most popular commercial packages are Spam-Killer ($39.95) from McAfee Associates and Norton Internet Security ($69.95) from Symantec, Inc. They work pretty well, but they are expensive. The lesser-known programs I hear the most good things about are SpamCatcher ($19.95), Spam Sleuth ($29.25), and SAProxy (free!).

Of course, in reality, you need to give other people an EMail address where you can be contacted in spite of the fact that every time you do so, the address you give out is probably going to end up on a SPAMmer's mailing list eventually. Until the various governments and Internet consortiums finally get a handle on this plague, the only interim solution is to maintain two EMail addresses - a public one that you post on website Forums and use for ordering online, and a private one that you give only to friends and family.

Try http://www.mailwasher.net for help if you receive your EMail through your Internet Service Provider (ISP).

Check out the Federal Trade Commission SPAM Information.