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Update July 2005: Proper use of
Outlook 2003 will eliminate more than 75% of spam. Microsoft has done
a marvelous job on the product. The information below can help prior
users of Outlook and users of other products. The spam
tips below are still helpful and can prevent you from being added
to spammer databases.
Unsolicited e-mail, also called spam
has become a serious threat to the Internet and our privacy. "E-mail
siphon programs" have been developed that scour the Internet,
harvesting e-mail addresses to sell to spammers. A combination
of devious spammers who are legislated and offshore spammers who are
not legislated are flooding our inboxes with junk e-mail.
Companies such as Network Solutions were and still may be aggressively
selling
their domain name databases and other customer data to direct
marketers.
ZDNet
reported on August 30, 2002, that spam
makes up 36% of traffic and could make up the majority of message
traffic by the end of 2002. The U.S. government is working
toward legislation. . The RID-spam Act of 2003 (HR 2214) would
require e-mail mass-marketers to label their messages as marketing and
use valid return addresses. It would enable consumers to opt out of
all commercial e-mail, and would allow state and federal lawmakers and
ISPs to sue spammers. The bill, which has seven cosponsors, is now in
a House committee. The FTC is becoming serious about spam
and is organizing
conferences. The unfortunate fact is that spammers
will attempt to slither to offshore facilities if banned in the U.S.
Many organizations are becoming more proactive in the fight against
spam. The California law firm of Morrison & Foerster
has filed
suit (2002) against an email marketing company, claiming it has
bombarded it with thousands of unsolicited email advertisements.
We are tracking spam law suits on one of our bulletin
boards.
Spam, sometimes called unsolicited
e-mail, is offensive and often illegal, especially if it involves
pyramid marketing. Internet Service Providers (ISP's) are strongly
opposed to it. It angers recipients and can clog up the ISP's
systems due to its volumes and having to deal with returned spam.
Spammers develop technology rapidly.
We must make the "delete key" our friend and companion and become
accustomed to using it.
Microsoft Outlook 2003 has some very
nice spam detecting features and automatically places potential spam
in the Junk folder to be reviewed by the recipient. Anti-spam filtering
software can be very helpful to salvation to Web users. Anti-spam software,
including Cloudmark
Spamnet, McAffee
SpamKiller,
Spamshark,
SpamAssassin,
and MailWasher,
typically compares e-mail addresses against a spam server blacklist
and the user's server blacklist and, depending upon how the user
configure has configured the software, marks or deletes known spam and
marks potential spam. Viruses are also marked. The user
can then process the e-mail on the vendor's server, deleting spam
prior to downloading legitimate e-mail into his/her e-mail system.
Once a user has used anti-spam software for a few days, most spam is
recognized and marked as spam. A
review of MailWasher can be found on our general discussion board.
Malicious spammers often use an
unsuspecting Unix Web site's mail program, e.g., formmail.pl to send
spam. This happened to us in early July 2001. We were
again targeted in late July and updated our formmail.pl program to
prevent future occurrences. We suspect that we have been
targeted due to our active stand and articles against spammers.
If the formmail abuse happens to you, report the incident to your Web
host so they can take action to secure your mail program. Visit
the spammers site and report the spammer to their ISP. If they
use e.g., Yahoo or Excite e-mail addresses, report the abuse to the
e-mail address provider.
There are currently several ways to
slow spam down and in many cases, prevent it. Tips to
thwart spammers and help you manage your e-mail follow:
- Outlook Express currently allows you
to double click on a message, right mouse click on the
"From" field and "Block"
the sender. Outlook permits the same capability by
"right mouse clicking" on the body of the message.
More sophisticated spammers have devised methods to circumvent the
block procedure by sending spam from multiple mail systems.
- Use your E-mail filters (rules in
Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, etc.) to delete, block or
reroute spam. Outlook Express and Outlook provide
"rules" which can be used to block or delete spam.
To use "rules" click on Tools > Rules and define the
offending e-mail address, people, words or subject to be blocked,
deleted or rerouted. Define the rules by spammer name
(from), subject or body text or "To." Often,
spammers use multiple addresses and subjects to confuse filters.
In such a case, you can sometimes place the the URL (e.g., spammername.com) in your "blocked senders list."
-
The
"blocking" technique discussed
above is the simplest approach. Unfortunately, it is not
fool-proof, especially for e-mail addresses which can be easily
changed. A technique that works nicely with Outlook Express,
Outlook and Eudora, especially if you have a limited number of
incoming e-mail addresses, is to set up a folder for your key e-mail address(es.) Your e-mail system will forward your legitimate
e-mail to that (or those) folder(s). As an example, you might have
a folder called "Dales" to which your use
"Rules" to forward e-mail addressed to dtincher@consultwebs.com
(business) and daletincher@worldnet.att.net
(personal.). You would set up discussion list and other folders,
if applicable, such as FPList for FPlist@yahoogroups.com.
Folders are normally set up using a "rules" function.
Since spammers typically write to a fictitious e-mail address such
as friend03740@aol.com, the remainder of the e-mail in your inbox
will primarily be spam. After testing the process for a few
days to make sure you haven't missed any folders, you will be able
to begin quickly reviewing the non-folder e-mail and choosing
"Select All" and deleting the spam in your inbox or
"block
delete" by putting a finger on the Shift key,
highlighting the first message, clicking on Page Down and then
clicking on Delete. Or, you can "Select All" and
"Move" the e-mail to the junk folder for later review.
Eudora users can automatically route "everything else"
to a folder, e.g., a junk folder. You can configure your
e-mail system to leave deleted e-mail on the system for a few days
in order to prevent losing an e-mail that you may need to recover.
An area to watch carefully is carbon copies (cc:'s) and blind
copies (bc:'s.)
- Spammers attempt to use catchy
subject phrases or words. Consider setting up subject
rules (filters) for expected spam mail subject area words and
content (e-mail body) such as $, wow, mortgage, adult, sex, xxx,
porn, hardcore, health, stocks, free, loan, debt, resort, home
worker, work from home, wealth, secrets, enhancement, lose weight,
snore, snoring, viagra, amaze, merchant account, investors,
investment, trade, fail-safe, making money, alert!, Revealed! and
other typical spam words. Many spammers attempt to comply
with spamming laws by including "SECTION 301",
"S.1618", "H.R. 3113" or simply
"3113" and "1618" in the body of the message.
Some spammers are send HTML pop-ups of pornographic images (use
Alt F4 to remove the pop-up.) Find a commonly used word in
the body of their e-mail and add it to your delete rules.
Set your rules to check for these phrases in the body of the
message. Send all of these to the junk folder. Review
the junk folder periodically and delete the undesired contents.
I receive my e-mail and the
"anything else" e-mail intended for our server. As a
result, I receive more than 2,000 spam e-mails per day. Click
here to view an image of how my mailbox folder is configured.
Click
here to see examples of rules numbers and here
to view an example rule. Click
here to see how to Block > Delete large blocks of spam (that
have slipped through your rules) after dragging the e-mails you wish
to keep to another folder. (New windows will be opened. To
exit, click on the X in the upper right of your screen.)
You should also set up "From"
rules and a folder or folders for your boss and key associates and
clients. You don't want to miss an e-mail from your boss giving
you a free health resort vacation. :-)
Additional spam tips and resources are
listed below:
- Never buy from a spammer. You
are welcome to add one of the above buttons to your site. If
consumers don't buy, spammers will stop. Start a movement in your
Internet community to ban spam by ignoring it. Don't
click on a link and visit their site. Visits encourage
them.
- Never buy a mailing list from a
company who works with spammers. Avoid mailing list
providers who spam your e-mailbox announcing inexpensive mailing
lists and do not publish a Web site address. Work with
ethical providers.
- Avoid using "free"
Internet services, e.g., free submissions, HTML validators, etc.,
that require detailed information from you.
- Do not feed spam databases and
confirm that your address is still valid by sending a reply E-mail
and saying "unsubscribe."
- Use auto-responders prudently.
They confirm your e-mail address and can cause "loops."
- Do not "flame" spammers.
They don't care or they would be in a legitimate profession.
- If you really want to get back at
them, call their toll-free number (at their expense) and tell them
what you think of them. Caller I.D. may divulge your number,
so don't vent all of your pent-up frustration :-).
- Anti-spam newsgroups include news.admin.net-abuse.bulletins. Perform an Internet search
and you will find more newsgroups.
- When reporting spam or writing to
unknown services, do not use your actual e-mail address.
Even spam policing sites have been known to collect addresses to
sell to spammers.
- Use a Hotmail
type e-mail account or an alias e-mail address to write to
individuals or companies with whom you are not familiar. An
alias address, e.g., mytempaddress@myisp.com, which
forwards to your actual address or simply collects mail for later
review, can typically be deleted or changed at will. Hotmail
has a Hotmail Inbox Protector which is designed to allow
you to control what e-mail you receive in your Inbox. All unwanted
mail goes directly to the Bulk Mail folder. Messages more than 14
days old are automatically deleted from your Bulk Mail folder to
help you stay under your account quota.
- You can sometimes report spammers to their ISP by "forwarding" their intact
message to their or your ISP. Most ISP's have an address called
"abuse" the ISP's name." I have had success
in having spammers' accounts terminated. ISP's are against
spam.
To Report spam, you should capture
as much information about the spammer and the message content as
possible. You can do this by following the below
procedure to capture the e-mail header and content.
Open your e-mail program.
Outlook or Outlook Express users should click on File >
Properties > Details. Netscape users should click on View
> Headers > All.
Paste the spammer's header
information into the body of an e-mail by clicking on the left
mouse button and holding it down while dragging the mouse over the
header content. Right mouse click and choose Copy. Paste the
header information into an e-mail. Send the pasted information and
e-mail content to the spammer's Internet Service Provider (ISP)
and to some of the following organizations. The ISP to
whom a particular IP belongs can often be found through at ARIN
Whois.
Helpful spam prevention links and
articles include:
We and others frequently update spam
information on our Discussion
Boards. See additional spam information, e-mail
configuration guides and spam reporting procedures and links
on our Web
Resources http://www.consultwebs.com/webresources.htm#spam_prevention
page.
The Information Super-Highway is
wonderful and has many exciting sights. A few potholes and unsavory
hitch-hikers are to be expected. Happy navigating.
You are welcome to take one of our
spam buttons and/or link to this article. You may also reprint
it in periodicals or on Web sites if you send an e-mail notice to daletincher@consultwebs.com
and credit is given to Consultwebs.coms, including our Web site link.
You may prefer to link to the article since we continue to update
the content and links. The article is a product of our past spam
articles, experimentation, reading and gleanings from generous and
knowledgeable individuals on discussion lists.
Consultwebs.com is a Raleigh, North
Carolina Web design, promotion and consulting firm. Anyone, other than
spammers :-), is welcome to contact Dale Tincher (daletincher@consultwebs.com
or 919-272-8052) for further information.
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