rahji.com

If you have an email address then you have received SPAM. SPAM is another name for unsolicited commercial email (UCE). You’d recognize it as the score of annoying messages in your inbox that assure you that you can stop smoking, lose inches in days, or (ahem) gain inches in days. This post is the intented to give you some tips to help minimize the effect that SPAM has on your own inbox. If you’re a web developer, Part 2 has some tips that will help keep you from accidentally doing something that might get users of your website SPAMMED as well.

Tips for Everyone

How did you start getting all this mail? How do they know your address? Well, some companies that you’ve dealt with online may have sold a list of their customers’ email addresses to another company that uses unsolicited email to get new customers. In my experience this doesn’t happen as often as we might think. First, most companies that I deal with on the Internet have a posted privacy policy that states that they will not share your personal information. Check your favorite online store and you’ll probably find a link to such a notice at the bottom of their homepage. Also, I think most of the companies that send UCE prefer to collect email addresses themselves using software (often called a “robot”) that crawls from webpage to webpage looking for anything that looks like an email address. This means that anytime you sign a guestbook or take part in an online discussion where your email address appears on the website, you may become the target of SPAM. Hopefully the tips below will allow you to still take part in those activities without putting your inbox at quite as much risk.

• If you want to put your address in some public forum like a guestbook or message board so that people can contact you, you might consider writing the address so that a human would recognize it as an email address but a SPAMMER’s email-collecting “robot” wouldn’t. For example, if your email address is jjx3@rahji.com, you might want to write like this: jjx3 at rahji dot com. Of course it wouldn’t be hard to create a robot that wouldn’t be fooled by that trick, but it’s worth a try. Maybe you could write it with hyphens instead of spaces between the words to make it a little trickier. In any case, you’re assuming that the human reading it will recognize that it’s an email address. While it isn’t too hard to understand, someone who is very new to the Internet may not get it.
• A sometimes not-so-good practice that has become pretty popular is changing an address like jjx3@rahji.com to something like this jjx3NOSPAM@rahji.com or jjx3@NOSPAM.rahji.com. The idea is that a person wanting to contact you should remove the NOSPAM portion from the address before using it. Since it still looks like an email address even with the NOSPAM in there, a SPAMMER’s robot will collect it and later send some UCE to it. Although that UCE doesn’t bother you, depending on how you modified the address someone else may still have to deal with it. Without getting too technical, the email message may still be sent to the mail server at rahji.com at which point it will be found to be invalid. It still creates unneccessary messages to be sent through the Internet and it may give the postmaster at that domain a headache. In addition, you still have the problem that a new user may not understand what to do with an address like this when they see it. Usually people put some instructions like “remove the NOSPAM to send me mail” so that helps. In any case, there are all sorts of arguments about where the NOSPAM should appear in the address, but I’d recommend not using this technique at all and sticking with some variation of the first tip above.
• Ask your ISP (whomever you dial up to connect to the Internet) about their ideas on getting rid of SPAM. Some ISPs can give you a special email address specifically designed to filter out SPAM.
• Don’t respond to SPAM. There are a lot of instructions and software applications that will allow you to find the source of the message, complain, tell them you’re not interested in their products, etc. This can just create more SPAM since now the sender of the message knows that there’s a real person at your email address – it’s not an invalid address that their robot picked up somewhere. Complaining probably isn’t going to get you anywhere unless you really put in some effort to track down the culprit and complain to their ISP. If I were to do that for all of the SPAM that I receive, I wouldn’t be able to leave the house! I prefer to focus my efforts on getting rid of the messages from my inbox before I have to look at them.
• Don’t patronize SPAMMERs! Even if it’s something you really want to buy or whatever, don’t do it! Find another company to deal with. Patronizing SPAMMERs just encourages them and lets them know that sending UCE is a valid way to get customers. Don’t click any links in SPAM messages either, since the link is often encoded to tell the company that you reached the website from a link in a SPAM message.
• Find an email reader with anti-SPAM features built it. Alternatively, SPAM-eliminating extensions have been written for some popular email programs. If your email account is on a UNIX server that you have access to, you should check out a program called procmail which can filter your email based on certain rules. Sets of rules that find and eliminate SPAM have already been developed and are available for downloading. Search google and you’ll find a bunch of other solutions. No matter which software you choose, you should realize that none of them are 100% effective. Your best bet is to choose one that will allow you to refine the rules used to determine what is SPAM and what isn’t.
• If you have your own website with its own domainname (like I do with rahji.com), be careful about where you post the URL of your website. One tactic that SPAMMERs use is to send email to the webmaster at whatever URL they find on the web. If you’re at the other end of that webmaster address, you may already be noticing a lot of UCE addressed to you.
• Another thing you can do if you’re in control of your own domain, is create different email aliases that all point to your normal email address. For example, if I sign up for an account at joestore.com maybe I use an address like joestore@rahji.com instead of my main email address. This has a few advantages. First, if I start receiving SPAM from other companies at the joestore@rahji.com address, I know that joestore.com has been sharing my personal information with other companies. Second, if I ever get sick of joestore and the companies he’s shared information with, I can point that alias to /dev/null (if I’m using UNIX) where they will be deleted the instant they’re received. Even if I’m not using UNIX, I could always create a rule in my email reader that deletes any email with a To: line of joestore@rahji.com. If your email reader doesn’t allow you to create rules, get a different email reader.
• If you use usenet (Internet newsgroups), don’t ever post messages from your main email address. Usenet is the most popular place for SPAMMERs to collect email addresses and you’ll likely receive dozens of unsolicited messages within a few days of your posting. There are services that let you post anonymously to usenet groups. Deja.com used to allow you to create an email account on their site and post from there. Now that they’re owned by Google, that feature has been removed but it may come back someday. In the meantime, sign up for a Hotmail account and use that. Hotmail even has a built-in SPAM filter (although it doesn’t work very well in my experience).

If you’re a web developer, Part 2 has more information for you.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 License.