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May 29, 2006
Spam: Not just for breakfast anymore
Email has become a mainstay in today’s business and personal communications. Unfortunately, spam has become just as prevalent. Spam is defined as “unsolicited, unwanted, irrelevant, or inappropriate messages, especially commercial advertising in mass quantities,” also popularly known as junk mail. If you have an email address, chances are you have received spam for various medications, augmentations or solicitations. At least, these emails can be an annoyance. At worst, they can carry viruses, spyware and bring your computer down.
A less benign, but no less annoying source of spam is email from your friends. Chain letters promoting good luck, untold fortunes and magic carpets are all forms of spam. If you ever get an email you suspect, but are not sure if it is legitimate, try Snopes.com, a great site for debunking spam and urban legends.
Spammers are crafty and can get your email address in a variety of ways.
The first is just by using all common names, such as tom, jane, info, billing, etc. They also use programs to send emails to any address it can generate, so it might stumble upon tjones or bigskyski. If you have a website, you are much more likely to receive spam. Most people put their email address on the contact page of their websites, and spammers write programs to “crawl” the web and look for email addresses on any page and add those addreses to their database. When you register a web site addresses, you also have to list a contact email address. This email address is publicly accessable and spammers will also harvest these addreses. Check with your web designer on ways to overcome these problems.
Perhaps the first step is recognizing spam and not opening emails. Look at who sent the email. First, do you know this person? Secondly, what is the subject? If you are being offered enlargements or medications, you can safely assume that the email is spam. If it is spam, don’t open it. If you have already opened it, don’t click on any links in the email or download any attachments. Depending on what email program you use (Yahoo!
or Hotmail for example) you can identify email as spam so future messages will be blocked.
You can purchase an anti-spam program for your email. Spyware Doctor,
InBoxer or Spam Monitor all work with Microsoft Outlook. Mozilla’s free email program, Thunderbird, has a free spam protector built in, as does Apple’s email program, Mail. Most of these rely on a “Bayesian” technique to determine what email is spam and what is not. It often requires a training period, and sometimes makes mistakes, but if you spend a lot of time on email, these programs are invaluable. There are also programs that require you to prove yourself as a legitimate sender before passing along the email to it’s intended recipient.
While no program or technique will likely free you of all spam, a few simple steps can help ebb the flow of spam and hopefully reduce the time spent sorting through it all.
