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Tips to Help You Avoid Spam
Spam used to be just a simple canned meat product, made from hundreds of
innocent little spam animals. Okay, well, maybe that's not what it was
made with, but the fact remains that spam means something entirely
different to the Internet community at large. While some people like the
canned variety, almost everyone abhors the online kind.
Spam is well known for reducing productivity, wasting time, infuriating
people, and sometimes spreading virus. Here is a list of 8 tips that
will help you avoid spam. Although there is little one can currently do
to stop spam altogether, by using these helpful tips I have personally
reduced my spam to almost nothing.
1. Use a catch-all addy such as those offered through Yahoo! or Hotmail
for signing up for offers, contests, non-professional newsletters, etc.
online. Periodically check this account and clear out all the spam. This
will ensure that your e-mail account won't be closed due to inactivity.
2. Be careful what you sign up for online. Make sure you read the
privacy policies of the site involved; some will sell your e-mail
address and some won't. Be aware of check boxes in signup forms that,
when left unchecked, allow the company to share your information with
other firms. If you don't want your information shared, make sure you
check that little box. (This may also work vice-versa, with the checkbox
being left unchecked to ensure that your information is not shared with
anyone. Read the instructions carefully!) Remember: Just because a
company seems reputable and you trust them, don't believe they will keep
your e-mail addy private unless they specifically say so in their
privacy policy.
3. Remember what you signed up for - if you sign up for a newsletter in
the middle of the month, it may take another month for the newsletter to
arrive in your mailbox. Keep confirmation e-mails in a separate folder
in your e-mail proggie so that you can double-check that you did indeed
sign up for any e-mail you think you may have received in error.
4. When you forward e-mails, be careful. Continuous forwards can result
in anyone being able to harvest several e-mail addresses from just one
of these bulky e-mails!
If you use Outlook or Outlook Express, use the BCC (blind carbon copy)
feature to send mass e-mail. Simply enter all e-mail addresses into the
BCC field. Eudora also has the capability to hide the recipient's
e-mails. If someone is sending you continuous forwards, ask the sender
not to send things like this to you any longer. (These kinds of forwards
are also an excellent way to get virii.)
5. Don't include your e-mail addy when signing guestbooks or online
forums. Doing so will make your address available to all and sundry as
e-mail addresses can easily be harvested from any website. If you want
to use an e-mail addy on such things, use your "catch-all" e-mail
address.
6. Along those same lines, be aware that posting to e-mail lists with
publicly available archives will result in your e-mail address being
shown to anyone who checks the archives or uses a bot to harvest e-mail
addies. You can find out where your e-mail address has been posted by
typing it into a search engine and searching. I recommend using Google
for this, as it seems to currently be the most efficient search engine
for this purpose.
7. If you have a website and believe your e-mail addy may be or has been
"harvested" from it, you can use a JavaScript to prevent it from
happening. You can easily get an automatically generated JavaScript for
this purpose at Hiveware (http://www.hiveware.com/enkoder_form.php).
Simply enter your information into the available form and it will return
the code to you, ready for copying and pasting.
8. Never click on the "Remove" link found in many spam e-mails. This
only enables the company or individual sending the spam to verify that
their e-mail reached someone. Many will not remove you from their list
as promised but will instead continue to send you spam (since they know
they're sending it to a valid address) and may even sell your e-mail
addy to other spammers. If despite your best efforts you still receive
spam, you can still do something about it. SpamCop.com offers an easy
way to report spammers to their ISPs (or hosting providers) for terms of
service violations. (It is a violation of most ISP's and web hosting
service's Terms of Service policies for a customer to send spam.) To get
the information needed to report spammers, you're going to need what is
called the "header." The header of an e-mail contains all manner of
specifics about who sent the e-mail and enables any ISP to determine who
the culprit is.
To find the header in Outlook, first open the e-mail in a separate
window. Now go to "View" and then "Options." At the bottom of the dialog
box that opens, you will find a box labeled "Internet headers." Copy
everything in this box and paste into the SpamCop.com form.
Using Outlook Express, open the e-mail in a separate window. Click on
"File," then "Properties." The dialog box is entitled "Highlights from
report." Now click on the tab that says "Details." Beneath the words
"Internet headers for this message," you will see a box containing all
the header information. Copy everything in this box and paste into the
SpamCop.com form.
Visit http://www.abika.com/Reports/Samples/emailheaderguide.htm to find
out how to locate the headers in almost every other e-mail program from
Pegasus Mail to Eudora to Hotmail.
Sending "hate mail" to the apparent sender of spam e-mail is
counter-productive and a waste of your time, not to mention possibly
encouraging more spam, some of which may have the potential to be
malevolent. In some cases, your "hate mail" won't even go to the person
who's really sending it. E-mail addresses can be "spoofed," or, in
layman's terms, the e-mail appears to have been sent from a different
address than it was truly sent from. This is why you must use header
information when reporting spammers. It's the only way to determine who
really sent the spam.
If you believe someone with a privacy policy in place has used your addy
for malicious purposes, contact them immediately. If they are of no
help, contact their hosting service provider immediately and report
them.
To find out what hosting firm is providing service for any given domain
name, head to samspade.org/t/. Enter the domain name into the first
field on the page and click "Do stuff." A page will appear showing you
the IP address that the domain name resolves to. Copy the IP address.
Now go back to the first page and paste the IP address into the same
field you used before. Click "Do stuff" again. The results will show you
who the site is hosted by.
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