WSG Newsletter: Say No to Spam

Issue: October 26, 2001

If you have an e-mail address, you are sure to receive spam. Spam is electronic junk mail - unsolicited arrivals in your inbox such as advertising or scams with headlines like "Have Hair Loss? We Can Help You!", pyramid schemes, chain letters and more. Junk e-mail comprises about 10% of messages sent today, and may increase to 40% by 2006.

This newsletter describes how to protect yourself from spam. Spam, before it was e-junk, was tinned luncheon meat made by Hormel. Monty Python made it famous in a skit years ago when everyone cried out - spam, spam, spam - I don't want any spam. The TIG newsletter of the same name has more on that story.

Who gets spam?

Most people who receive spam receive it because they post to newsgroups, subscribe to email newsletters, have their address posted on a web page, visit chat rooms, or enter into online contests. Essentially, any activity performed on the Internet where you leave your email address behind is fodder to a spammer. This doesn’t mean we shouldn't partake of these activities - just that we should do them differently.

There is some pretty weird stuff floating around out there. For example, on August 25th, 2001 I received the following email:

If you are an alien disguised as human and or have the technology to travel physically through time I need your help! My life has been severely tampered with and cursed by a very evil women of my past. I need to be able to:

• Travel physically back in time
• Rewind my life including my age
• Be able to remember what I know now so that I can prevent my life from being tampered with again after I go back.

I am in great danger and need this immediately! Only if you are an alien or have this technology please send me a separate email to: [email address] Thanks

Needless to say, I did not reply!

Minimize Spam

It’s difficult to eliminate spam, but we can minimize it. There are two fronts to this battle. Don’t give out your email address, and manage the spam you do get.

Don’t give out your email address:

1) Use an alternate email address whenever you sign up for any type of web service or post to a newsgroup. Spammers love newsgroups for the email addresses they can gather. Have a public and a private address. Then you will only have to deal with spam in your public account.

2) If you use Hotmail or any of the web-based email services make sure you are NOT listed in the Member Directory or White pages. These are another rich source for spammers. At Hotmail, use the block and bulk mail filter options.

3) Don’t put your email address on your web page as a link. Spammers can harvest emails from web pages by using software that crawls the web for viable email addresses. Instead, you can write your address as text: John at company dot com. Do this also when posting to Newsgroups.

4) Never give out your email address unless you know how it will be used. Read the privacy statements of the web sites before giving them your email address. If there are no assurances that they won’t sell your address to other, abandon the site or fake it – make up a fake address like anyone@company.com or the very popular foo@bar.com.

5) “Change your "reply to" e-mail address to something like john@NOSPAMcompany.com. Whereas most people will know to delete the capitals, robots will probably not.

6) Use a service such as MailShell (http://www.mailshell.com/mail/client/fd.html). Yahoo Internet Life in January 2001 described MailShell as, "a middleman between you and your various newsletters. It makes getting on and off mailing lists as simple as checking or unchecking a box, and it can automatically unsubscribe you from a list after a specified period of time. That way, you can try out a newsletter for, say three days. Also Mailshell does not provide mailing lists with your real e-mail address or profile information. Instead, it signs you up to lists using an alias - a nice measure that helps protect your privacy."

MailShell has a free basic service and a premium service at $29.95 US a year. Subscribing to the premium services includes benefits such as blocking viruses, hidden tracking devices, and pornographic images from your incoming email.

Manage Spam You Do Receive

1) Do NOT reply to spam. There might be a link to opt-out but don’t use it. Any response is only confirms that they have a valid email address. Then they sell it, causing you to receive even more spam. Oftentimes, the opt-out link is a broken URL, or an invalid email address.

2) Use spam filters. Most email programs – including IE Outlook, Netscape Messenger, Eudora - let one set up rules to filter email into designated folders. These are still crude but can help divert some junk. Set them to catch words in the subject line like cash, casino, free, sex or more recently, anthrax. Or define filters to sideline email from .ru or .tw or even hotmail.com. You do need to be careful about the filters you set, since they can also filter out email you do want. Direct suspected spam to a separate folder and go through it regularly.

3) Don’t buy anything from spam email - it's not good to encourage the commercial spammers.

4) Don't forward chain mail, jokes, or hoaxes. Although these aren't exactly spam they do add to email clutter. Jokes are a matter of personal taste - but often one's personal taste is another's distaste.

Report Spam

Here comes the fun stuff – a way of coping with the frustration of receiving spam - report abuse to the spammer’s ISP. Granted, even if their ISP blacklists them, there is nothing to stop them from opening another account with another ISP or under another name. However, there is something satisfying about reporting spam, and I frequently use my free account with spamcop to send complaints. I have actually received responses that the spammer I reported lost ISP privileges. Remember, however, that the complaint service, might use your email address when they forward complaints.

1) Often you can simply forward the email to the ISP using an abuse@ email address. For example, abuse@yahoo.com or abuse@hotmail.com. You may be able to locate the domain name of the ISP and send the postmaster an email of complain using WHOIS at http://www.whois.net/ to look up the domain name and get contact information.

2) You can report spam at www.spamcop.net by either joining their free service, or subscribing at a low rate. They also have an email address (spamcop@spamcop.net) you can use to simply forward email for them to deal with. There are FAQ’s about spam at Spamcop which are worthwhile reading for more information. Spamcop also protects your email address when they send abuse reports to spammers’ ISPs.

Spamrecycle.com (http://www.spamrecycle.com/) is another that provides a reporting service you can use for free. Forward your email to spamrecycle@ChooseYourMail.com. They also encourage you to sign an anti-spam petition.

3) Fight Spam at http://spam.abuse.net/ has bountiful information and links on how to minimize and deal with spam. Their sister site, the Network Abuse Clearinghouse (http://www.abuse.net), is another informative web site detailing ways and means of fighting spam.

4) SpamCon Foundation (http://law.spamcon.org/) makes available information about spam cases, texts of the relevant laws, news, and discussion.

Conclusion

It is unlikely that we will be able to completely stem the flow of spam. However, we can certainly minimize the amount of spam we receive by being careful when giving out our email address, setting up email filters, using anonymizer services like MailShell, and reporting spam to the spam cops.

Newsletter by Kirsten McKnight -Your local, friendly, anti-spam crusader! with additions by Gwen Harris