Avoiding Spam

Why do I Get Spam?

Spam is unsolicited commercial e-mail or unsolicited bulk e-mail (and which sometimes has a virus attached).

People get spam because spamming is profitable. You get spam because somehow your e-mail address got into a spammer's database.

This can happen in many ways:

• You entered your e-mail address somewhere on the net to purchase a product, use a service, or get information and that address was obtained by or sold to an organisation that collects such e-mail addresses and sells them in turn to companies or independent spammers.
   
• Your e-mail address could also have been harvested by a spambot (an automatic scanner which reads websites and collects data - how else would Google get its legitimate information). If you post to usenet groups, mailing lists, or have your e-mail address on the web somewhere, it will almost certainly get into a spammer's database.
  
  
• The most likely reason you are getting spam is that your address was harvested off a web site including a mailto: link with your address.

The good news seems to be that even if your address has been culled from a web site, getting rid of such links will reduce your Spam.  Such addresses are harvested regularly and spammers seem to assume that harvested e-mail address have short half−lives.

One way to check whether or not your e-mail address is on a website somewhere is to search for it on a major search engine like Google, Dogpile, or Metacrawler. If you can find it, then a spambot has already.

If you do find it, you can ask the webmaster to remove it, if possible.

Should I click "Remove" or "Unsubscribe" links in spam messages?

Absolutely not. Don't do it. They don't work. Moreover, they just verify to the spammer that your address is a valid one. Unsubscribing from spam is counterproductive.

Do use multiple or disposable e-mail addresses?

You should consider having an address separate from your personal or business address for use in places where that address might be made public without your control or permission.

Whenever you enter your e-mail address on a web site somewhere, you should first consider what kind of company is involved and then look for their privacy policy, and then take the time to read it before you decide whether or not you want to enter any personal information.

As an example, you might want to look at Yahoo!'s privacy policy, and in particular the section Information Sharing and Disclosure, where even if you haven't given permission to share your personal information, there are conditions when it will be shared nonetheless!

If you are unsure what will become of your e-mail address once entered online somewhere, you can use a second address, like a free yahoo or hotmail account, which you can forward to your personal address if you need to.

You can then discard the address if you start to get spam to it.

Such temporary and disposable e-mail addresses are also useful for usenet or mailing list postings that might get publicly archived.

Do try an anti−spam filter with your e-mail software?

If you are getting a lot of Spam, you might want to try an anti−spam filter with your e-mail client software.

While almost all e-mail programs allow you to set up filters, the increasing sophistication of spamming techniques makes simple solutions like filtering on the occurrence of a particularly spammy term or phrase less effective.  You will need to consider many possibilities just to block mail with terms like V^AaGr^a, which get the spammer's message across, but foil simple filters based on expression matching.

I use Thunderbird as my email client which is free and has just as powerful spam filters included [www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/].