I wanted to take a departure from talking about computer hardware with this article, by
discussing something which has become just as annoying and time consuming as any hardware
malfunction. One of the fastest growing problems with using computer email these days is
all the darn unsolicited commercial email known as "SPAM" which is sent to your
email address. SPAM is the name given to that endless stream of junk mail you get
every time you post to a news group, or visit a site which remembers your e-mail address.
Telemarketers and scam artists are taking advantage of the fact that they can advertise
free of charge, leaving you to pay the bill and bear the burden for their advertising
efforts. Worse yet, many of these bogus messages are attempting to get you
to visit a web site or open an attachment, leading to identity theft and other
types of attacks on you and your computer.
Time is valuable to most people, and sifting through many useless messages to
find the one or two legitimate messages is causing a huge waste of our valuable time. Some
years ago, a similar, unethical practice was performed. This was done by sending
unsolicited commercial messages to user's FAX machines, but laws were passed to prohibit
this practice because it shifted the expense and burden of advertising to the consumer,
rather than to the advertiser, where the expense belonged. Since the popularity of email has
increased dramatically, it is now popular practice to bombard the airwaves with useless
advertising email, many times obtaining addresses from unsuspecting visitors to USENET
news groups or various web sites. There are several methods which are in use today by
various telemarketers, including "bots" which scour the Usenet groups
and web sites,
stripping off email addresses to send to, as well as sites which set "cookies",
or collect personal information by making you submit to online surveys.
Posting to News Groups:
When you post to a news group, some of these telemarketing agencies
and scammers are using programs
to collect email addresses. This is possible because most users who post to news groups
have included their email addresses, embedded in headers, which are therefore harvested
from the postings and compiled into a large database to be used later. When you set your
preferences in your email program or web browser, you usually include such things as your
identity and your return email address. This information is placed in the header of any
messages or news group postings you send, and can then be gathered by the so called
"bot" programs.
One simple way to avoid these useless junk e-mailings is to just change the return
address in your preferences. For instance, if John Smith, who uses comcast.net for his
email service, were setting up his preferences, in the return address line, he might
simply put jsmith@comcast.net. To avoid having his
email return address collected by potential spammers, john might disguise (or
what we geeks call "munge") his email
address by either changing it to jsmith@NOcomcast.netSPAM,
or by changing it to something else entirely different. This way, when the email
bot is stripping off your email replay address to use later, it is taking a false address,
which will be non-deliverable. Notice also, that when the fake email address was
created, the domain name was changed to something different. If you change the
username, but still specify a valid domain name, you are going to make some ISP a little
angry with you, because they still have to deal with all of the email traffic, even the
bogus pieces. The danger there also is to make sure that people who will email you
legitimately know what your real email address is, and can ensure that is properly
entered in the "TO:" field when replying to your email messages. A safe way to
do this is to simply state at the bottom of the message to remove the "NO" and
"SPAM" from the email address before replying to it. These email
"bots" usually only strip off information from the header, they do not get this
information from the text body of the message, and therefore won't know what your real
email address is.
Using Email Filters:
Email filters are also useful in getting rid of unwanted email. Most newer email
programs include a filtering feature which allows the user to specify certain email
contents which can be identified, and cause the email to be sent to the "trash"
folder automatically. For example, a common subject for a telemarketing scam might read
"Make $$$ Now in Your Spare Time" in the subject field. By setting up your
filter to identify all messages containing "$" in the subject, these messages
can be automatically routed to your trash folder for deletion. Some mass e-mailers in
California are now having to comply with a state regulation which requires them to put the
letters "ADV:" or "AD:" in the
subject line. By identifying all messages with ADV: in the subject line
for filtering, the junk messages can be filtered out.
One unusual method of SPAM (and I still haven't figured
out why they do it) is to send a blank email with no subject, no message, and no
return address. An attempt to discover valid email addresses? I
haven't a clue, but it is a rampant problem. That's where my email filters
have really saved me. I wrote rules telling my email filters that if a
message comes in with a valid "from" address (meaning
name@emaildomain.com) it will have the "@" symbol somewhere in there.
If it does, my email rules do not get processed any further. The next rule
tells the filter to delete ALL email. Sounds scary, but it isn't.
Simply put, if the email is form a valid source, the filter keeps it. If
it is blank it gets trashed. So what about all the junk that has the
proper "@" symbol in the address? My follow on rules deal with those
appropriately.
Disposable Email Addresses:
Finally, a fairly reliable way to fool telemarketers is to use a
"disposable" email address as a clearing house for all your email. To be really
effective, look for one of the many free email services, such as Hotmail or Excite, which
has a filtering option. Many of these services have a well defined database of known
spammers, and can filter them automatically for you, as well as let you add your own
filters to protect against these suspected SPAM e-mailers. Many even offer to directly forward your email to
your real email address. You would set up your identity in your email program to specify
your disposable address. When bogus spam email is sent to you, it is filtered out
automatically, and the email service only forwards legitimate emails to you. Again, you
will want to make sure that your friends and associates know your real email address, or
at least how to reply to you through your disposable address.
Wrapping It Up:
SPAM email is clogging the Internet, and eating up our bandwidth. The most effective
thing we can do as an online community is to attack this time wasting practice and let our
elected representatives know how we feel about it. By enacting laws which prosecute the
people who are advertising at our expense, wasting our time and stealing our
identities, we can all enjoy our Internet services better,
and not spend so much time dealing with this junk mail which floods into our email boxes
every day. Even if laws are enacted, however, the sad reality is that catching
and prosecuting these buffoons will be impossible. So we fight back by
making them waste their resources on messages that go nowhere or get
automatically deleted when they get to us. To find out more about dealing with spam email, visit The Coalition Against
Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE) at http://www.cauce.org/
