FAQ

OK, I just got spammed. Now what?
But I only got one copy. How do I know it was really sent in bulk and therefore spam?
What are these "headers" you?
What follows are instructions for viewing headers with some of the more popular mail clients

Learn More...

1.Guard your in-box. Don't give out your e-mail address to anyone but the people you actually expect to correspond with. For dealing with everyone else, see tips 2 through 4.

2. Use free Web mail accounts. For merchants and legit others you don't correspond with regularly, use Web mail, such as Hotmail's or Yahoo!'s. You can abandon it if it gets spammed. Many have spam filtering built in.

3. Use a disposable e-mail address. Disposable e-mail addresses are great in-box insulators. Give them out in place of your real address, which remains hidden. You can always dispose of the address if it gets spammed.

4. Use fake addresses. Most Web-based sign-up forms require an e-mail address, but ask yourself, do they really need it? If you don't want to hear from the site (and don't need a confirmation e-mail or tech support), don't give a real address.

5. Don't post your address. Resist the impulse to post it on Web sites, guest books, contact lists, newsgroups, chat rooms, and so on; spammers harvest from these places. If you absolutely must reveal yourself, use a Web-mail account or a DEA. You can also put something extra in your e-mail that humans will know how to read but harvesting robots won't: sean@pretend.com could become sean AT pretend DOT com.

6. Don't answer spam. Ever. You won't stop spam by writing to the spammers, even if you ask nicely. At best, you'll flame a robot, which won't mind. At worst, you'll confirm that your e-mail address belongs to a naive human being—a valuable commodity for spammers. Ignore the "remove me" e-mail addresses, too. Many of these lead to dead or inactive e-mail addresses.

7. Opt out. When you do sign up for or buy something online and you have to give out an e-mail address, remember to opt out of everything you're not absolutely sure you want to receive.

8. Read the privacy policy. Make sure you understand what a Web site promises to do (and not to do) with your e-mail address. If there's no privacy policy, see tips 2 through 4.

9. Use a spam filter. Even if you follow tips 1 through 8, you're going to get spam. If you get more than you can handle, try one of the products we reviewed in this roundup.

A variety of techniques can be used to attempt to identify SPAM, and these techniques become more sophisticated all the time. (Of course, so do the attempts of spammers to circumvent them.) Some of the most common techniques include, in rough order of complexity:

Blacklists - blocking mail from certain senders, or sent via specific ip addresses. ("Don't accept any email from sam@spammer.com, or any other name on this list.")

Whitelists - similar methods as with blacklists, but instead used to allow mail to bypass any other spam identification methods being used and thus to be received. ("Deliver mail sent from my father no matter how much it may look like SPAM. The man does love his forwarded jokes, but he is my Dad, after all.")

Real Time Blacklists (RBL) - use of automated system to reject or mark mail that comes from ip addresses or domains that have been added to a blacklist due to reports of spam distribution or open relay problems. More information can be found here

Content Analysis - include pattern matching, spam definitions, heuristics; often use scoring techniques

"Bayesian" Analysis - identifying spam based on statistical analysis; characteristics of SPAM vs. HAM are learned from existing mail categorized by user and then applied to new incoming mail (further "learning" can take place in an ongoing fashion.)

All of these approaches have their own strengths and weaknesses. For example, blacklists are perhaps most effective in saving system resources related to processing spam in that traffic from certain sites is simply blocked, but they are likely to yield a poor overall hit rate, with high false positives. Alternately, user customized application of rules derived from Bayesian analysis may be most accurate method, but may not be scalable or easy to support for a large number of users. These methods are often used in varying combinations by spam filtering products. [TOP]

Spam Do’s and Don’ts:

Never respond to a spam e-mail. For a spammer, one "hit" among thousands of mailings is enough to justify the practice. Instead, if you want a product that is advertised in a spam e-mail, go to a website that also carries the product, inquire there, and tell them you do not approve of spam methods and will not patronise a company that uses spammers.

Never respond to the spam e-mail's instructions to reply with the word "remove." This is just a trick to get you to react to the e-mail - it alerts the sender that a human is at your address, which greatly increases its value. If you reply, your address is placed on more lists and you receive more spam.

Never mail-bomb spam sites or engage in hacking to stop spammers. This only increases the amount of wasted Internet traffic, creates sympathy for spammers, and makes the Internet even less reliable than it already is. [TOP]