Sick of

Sick of "Spam"?

This page is intended to be a primer on spam, and what you can do about it. To start, it is necessary to understand what spam is and isn't.��

One of the big differences between spammers and legitimate businesses is the way they handle requests to be removed from their mailing lists. A request to a legitimate business results in them removing you from their mailing list. They may even apologize for inconveniencing you. Meanwhile, a request to a spammer to remove you from their mailing results in more e-mail because you just confirmed the address is valid. You'll get mor��o anyone you don't want to have it. I have my "real" e-mail account where I get most of my personal and business e-mail. I also have a "junk" e-mail account at Yahoo! for those times I have to provide an e-mail address to complete a product registration for an upgrade, etc. I check my "real" account constantly, and only check my "junk" account every couple weeks. I also usually delete most of the stuff in the Yahoo! account without ev��resting or funny messages to everyone in their address book. If they insist, at lest get them to not include you in their mailings. After these messages have been forwarded a couple of times to "everyone you know," they will easily contain over a 100 valid e-mail addresses! This is a spammers delight! If your family and friends insist on passing along this junk, ask them to please send it to themselves, and list everyone else as "Bcc" addressees. ��span>

Don't ask to be removed from their list. Unless you are dealing with a reputable company, all you are doing is confirming your e-mail address is valid. This pretty much assures that you multiplied the amount of spam you will be receiving. Also, the odds are the unsubscribe address isn't valid. While we're at it, don't hit on those "special" links. That not only confirms your address, it also confirms that you read your e-mail and click for more information. Your value to spammers has significantly increased!

Use a mail filter. Microsoft Outlook 2000 and later have filtering software built-in. You can figure it out in a couple of minutes, and have the spam being deleted without ever having to look at it. With a little planning you can minimize the amount of work you'll have to do. The problem I had with the filter under Windows 2000 was that the rules were getting so large and unmanageable that it became unuseable. Because I set most of the rules to send most of the deleted files straight to spam heaven (could there be such a place?) that I didn't know what was still coming in. Another problem was that Outlook had to actually download the files to implement the rules. Then I ran across a program named Mailwasher. This is an excellent program that checks your mail regularly and shows what is the POP server. From here you decided what you want to delete, and even bounce back to the sender. You can add the sender's address, or even their entire domain. It remembers who is in your blacklist, who your friends are, and you can preview the message before you decide. I kind of like the bouncing part, although it doesn't accomplish much. I just gave me the satisfaction I get from shredding all the junk the Postal Service puts in my mailbox. One button and all the blacklisted items are deleted right off the POP server. Then you can deal with the rest of the mail.

Fight back. I keep getting price lists and sales fliers from companies we've never done business with. While several of them were very nice about removing me from their mailing list, others either ignored my requests or started sending a whole lot more. Since this is wasting my time, clogging my mailbox, and increasing the workload on my ISP's mail server, I figured I didn't have to put with it. A little homework and searching on the Internet gave me the information I needed to start fighting back. By learning how to track down the originating server, I was able to go back to source. While mikep3@spammer.com didn't want to stop sending me spam, root@spammer.com sure didn't waste any time shutting down the constant flow of spam. When I don't get anywhere with the domain (company or ISP), then it is time to go to their provider. There are plenty of tools available on the Internet to identify who owns a domain, and who their providers are. Trust me when I say that providers don't like to part of the spam problem since their resources are being taxed to the limit with spam. They really hate it when they are identified as being part of the problem. For more information on how to fight back, check out the following links:

SamSpade.Org Many wonderful tools to track down the source of the spam.

Death to Spam is a wonderful discussion on spam. Steven William Rimmer does a wonderful job of keeping things light while providing a ton of information.

Although they don't have a cute icon we can use to identify their site, Elsop's Anti-Spam Page has a lot of links to various sources of information. I actually received this link from a spammer's ISP. It has proved to be quite helpful.

The Internet Privacy for Dummies Web site has a very good tutorial on identify the origin of e-mail. The tutorial impressed me enough that I may even buy the book!

Summary. Since there is more than one way to fight spam, I suggest you do some research and develop your own strategy. Don't get discouraged when things don't seem to work out right. Do some more research and modify your strategy to cover the weaknesses. Don't expect to be successful on all attempts. Just be consistent and persistent. If you aren't successful at one level, go up-channel. I don't pursue all the spam I get, only the ones that are too frequent or offend me.

Last updated: November 11, 2007