Protect
Yourself from Spam
Stop
the flood of spam in your inbox E-mail
How
do spammers get your E-mail address?
The first step in fighting
spam is to understand how spammers get your E-mail address.
Many spammers operate
with "bots". There are autonomous software robots that
surf the Web looking for E-mail addresses. If you post your E-mail
address anywhere on a website (even on a discussion board or guestbook)
then there is a great chance that, sooner or later, a "bot"
will come across it and add it to its database of E-mail addresses.
These "bot" harvested E-mail addresses are often burned
onto CDs, which are sold to potential spammers !
NEVER post your main E-mail
address in plain form anywhere on the Web! Instead, sign up for
a spare E-mail account, or disguise your E-mail address by writing
it in a convoluted way that humans can interpret but "bots"
can't:
name@domain-name.com
-> nameATdomain-nameDOTcom
Other spammers generate
E-mail addresses by exhaustively trying all possible combinations
of E-mail addresses using automated tools. You can guard yourself
against this attack by making sure your E-mail address is relatively
long, and contains a complicated
mix of letters and numbers.
How
to fight spam ?
If you've been on the
web for any length of time, you've probably already come across
spam. "Spam" refers to junk mail. If you own a site, the
increase in spam you will experience is proportional to your site's
popularity. More visitors = more junk mails.
Don't be affraid of, there
are many things you can do to fight these spam.
Where
do spammers get all the information they need ?
Before you can beat spam,
you have to understand how, and more importantly where, spammers
get your E-mail address from.
Spammers suck up E-mail
addresses from just about anywhere you can imagine. As soon as you
post an article to an USENET newsgroup, you run the risk of having
your E-mail address vacuumed up by one of the many automated programs
spammers used to compile victims' E-mail lists...
Promote your
site on a What's New page, post to a mailing list, and spammers
will get your E-mail address. Nowadays, spammers use automated systems
to constantly collect E-mail addresses, 24 hours a day and 365 days
a year !
A dilemma: the only way
to avoid getting spammed is to remain "invisible", "stealth"
, but invisibility is the last thing you want when you are trying
to raise the profile of your site !
Free
E-mail addresses: a way to protect yourself
If you want the the spammer
don't be able to send you E-mail, don't give them YOUR E-mail address.
All you need to do is
sign up for one of the many free E-mail services that are provided
by all major sites. An interesting thing is that you sign up with
an E-mail forwarding service.
E-mail
forwarding services
An E-mail forwarding service
will give you a new E-mail address. All E-mail that is sent to your
"new" E-mail address will automatically be forwarded to
your existing E-mail account. That way, you can filter out the spam
!
If you are using an E-mail
package such as "Eudora", it is very easy to set up a
filter that will direct all mail sent to a certain E-mail address
into a separate folder. If you make it a practice to use ONLY the
free E-mail address when you are publicising your site to the outside
world, you should find that most spam gets filtered out and ends
up in this separate folder you set up.
Then, whenever you feel
is appropriate, you can delete the contents of that folder and all
the spam is gone.
Other ways to fight spam
DON'T be tempted by the
messages at the top or bottom of any spam, indicating "To be
removed from this mailing list, send a message to ..." . You
will get removed from that one particular mailing list (and the
spammers have THOUSANDS !) but more often you will get added to
a different spam list !
DO use every filter you
can think of. For instance, if you notice that many spam messages
contains precise words in them, you can program your email program
to automatically delete all messages with these words in them. |
