Apr '02 Tools

It's almost inevitable that at some time or other you will receive unwanted, unsolicted email - SPAM!

How do spammers get the email addresses they use?

There are many ways...

=> Did you sign a guestbook at a site you visited? It's a good idea not to use your primary email address for guestbook signing. Instead, use a free email account (like Yahoo) for guestbook signing.

=> Did you sign up for a free offer or newsletter at a site you visited? One of them could be a spammer, or may have sold your email address to one. It's a good idea to use a free email account to sign up for things like requesting newsletters and free offers too.

=> Someone you know may have sent an email to a list using "cc:" instead of "bcc:". This broadcasts all of the email addresses listed as "cc:" to everyone else on the list. To prevent this, everyone should get in the habit of using of "bcc:" to send copies.

=> You may be listed in one or more of the Internet directories like the white or yellow pages. It's a good idea to check these once in a while and delete your email address whenever you find it.

=> Did you post to newsgroups with your real email address? This is one of the spammers favorite places to get new email addresses.

=> Sometimes spammers just pick a domain and send their spam to thousands of made up email addresses at that domain. They use a book of names and send an email to every one of those names at the targeted domain. Those that are not valid get bounced back and are deleted from their list.

What you should never do...

Many spam emails will include a link at the bottom that says something like "to remove yourself from the list click here." Don't do it! Why? Because sending back an email to spammers, even one that requests removal, will only do one thing - confirm to them that they have a valid email address - one they can sell to other spammers as a list of "valid" or "clean" email addresses. So, requesting to be removed will only result in you receiving even more spam.

Spammers purchase lists - often on CDs - containing millions of email addresses. The spammer begins with this list of email addresses which are not validated. They are simply known not to have bounced back because of the address being invalid. As for all the rest that are not bounced back, the spammer has no way of knowing if they are being opened and read or not. Unless... you respond by requesting removal. Then you validate your email address for the spammer. This greatly increases the value of your email address and the spammer can actually sell all the validated addresses to somebody else as a "clean" list.

What can you do?

Your best option, aside from hitting the delete key, is to set up filters for your email. For example, you could set up a filter that would tell your email program to automatically delete all email from a particular sender or containing selected words in the subject or body of the message. You could also set up a filter that would send filtered emails to a designated folder so you can check through them before removing just to make sure you haven't deleted an email that isn't spam. Either way, you won't have to be bothered with them showing up in your inbox. Here's a resource that will give you some easy instructions for setting up filters in Netscape and Outlook email. http://support.bee.net/dial/email/spam/filtering.htm