Fighting back against spam

Next to computer viruses, e-mail spam is the Internet’s most annoying scourge. Each day, millions of useless, unsolicited e-mail messages flood the information superhighway’s pipelines and clog up people’s mailboxes. The messages range from lewd propositions from porno sites, get-rich-quick scams, chain letters, "special" deals on items, surveys, inquiry forms and often, just plain junk mail selling odd services and products to unsuspecting Netizens.

Spam is a serious problem; it encroaches on people’s machines, chokes the Internet infrastructure and drains millions upon millions of dollars due to system slowdowns and lost time. Imagine having to spend five to 10 minutes daily reading and deleting e-mail you don’t want; multiply that by the number of Internet users who face this cyber clutter each day and you can see how spam robs users of their time and companies of the productivity of their employees.

Wholesale propaganda

Spam is really nothing but Web marketing taken to absurd extremes. Companies purchase lists of e-mail addresses numbering in the tens of millions and these addresses are mail-blasted with inane messages or come-ons in the hope that even a small percentage of the recipients would respond.

The problem is that spam gets in the way of important personal and business e-mail and slows down the process. Spam is irresponsible marketing propaganda at the expense of users who often have no means of protecting their mailboxes from this barrage.

Spammers also take addresses from users who innocently post messages or join newsgroups. Even opening up a free Web-based e-mail account like Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, AOL or any of the other popular free services is enough for you to receive "legal" advertising from the services themselves and bulk spam from cunning spammers taking their chances and sending to millions of random addresses.

Spammers also gather e-mail addresses from mining databases for e-mail or paying for them, taking addresses directly from websites’ "contact us" pages and scouring newsgroups, popular forums and bulletin boards for active posters and their addresses.

Fighting the war

In the war against spam, anonymity is the best defense. Users should not use their main e-mail addresses or their business addresses when signing up on online services, partaking of surveys or subscribing to newsgroups. It is more prudent to set up a second or even a third e-mail address for these purposes.

While many unsolicited e-mail messages give users the option to unsubscribe from the list in order to avoid further messages from the source, unsubscribe options can also trigger negative results. Once you send mail back to the spammers, this is often an indication that the e-mail address is, indeed, live, thus confirming to spammers that there will be a recipient for that address.

The best thing to do is to take note of the offending e-mail address and report it to its host; you may include a copy of the text in your e-mail complaint. For example, if the source address is spammonster@aol.com, you should send an e-mail about this to abuse@aol.com. Most services like Hotmail, Yahoo! and Lycos have abuse addresses, or you can go to their contact-us information on their websites. This can be time-consuming and doesn’t always work as spammers have found numerous ways to fake e-mail addresses.

The best offense is defense

Fortunately, many of the modern e-mail applications used today such as Microsoft Outlook Express and Eudora’s Mail have built-in features for fighting spam. One just has to take the time to read up on these features that range from blocking specific addresses to enabling a "quarantine" feature that traps all these undesirable messages in specific folders for later viewing and deletion.

There are also a host of third-party programs that work with your e-mail client to intelligently sniff out spam messages. These applications are smart enough to alert source hosts and servers and send them copies of the spam. Some advanced applications can even do a trace back to the offending source.

Even popular Web-based e-mail services offer spam filters that can be activated at will; these are particularly useful for those who access their e-mail from cyber cafés, in their schools or workplaces. Tweaking your Web-based e-mail’s specs will save you a lot of time in the long run while getting rid of all that junk mail.

The best way to avoid being victimized by spammers is to be careful with your e-mail address and not give it out easily; once your address has been identified as live and useful it will soon fall prey to unscrupulous marketers.

A united front

The Internet is probably the world’s largest community. When something threatens it or its processes, one can always rely on shared knowledge base and power in numbers. A number of unified anti-spam fronts have been formed in the past few years, some are more zealous than the others. Organizations worth checking out online for help include Fight Spam on the Internet (http://spam.abuse.net), Spamcop (http://www.spamcop.com) which has free tools to contact offending administrators; CAUCE or Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (http://www.cauce.org) which is pushing for tougher anti-spam laws; and Abuse.net (http://abuse.net) which is collating a master list of offenders and offers complaint reporting tools as well.

By joining these offensives against unscrupulous spammers, Internet and e-mail users can help clean up the infrastructure, declog the pipelines and preserve the integrity of e-mail, one of the Internet’s most useful tools.