TECHLINE by Jim Youngquist

Coping with copious spam

[NOV. 14, 2000]  There are few people denying that email is one of the great inventions of the 20th century. It allows any average user with a computer or an internet appliance and a low-cost internet connection to communicate across town or across continents and oceans with any other internet user almost instantaneously. You can email a single message to multiple people at one time, carbon copy it to hundreds if you like, and everyone likes the price tag.

Almost every user finds out that there is an associated problem with email. Just as it is very easy for you to send email to all of your friends, relatives and co-workers, it is also easy for people you don’t know to send you email advertising their business schemes. This unwanted, unsolicited email is known as "SPAM," not to be confused with the well-known luncheon meat by Hormel.

For the purposes of this article, and the comfort of internet users, we should divide SPAM into two neat piles: items/services/schemes for sale and invitations to pornographic internet sites.

SPAM seems to be very upsetting and unsettling for most internet users. I have never had a conversation where an internet user says, "Yeah, I like SPAM. Can’t wait to get on the net and find out what the SPAMMERS have sent today!" Instead, we get calls from customers who wonder how the SPAMMERS got their email address and how they can stop getting the unsolicited mail. And SPAM advertising pornographic content or sites seems to be the most upsetting.

 

SPAMMERS are generally unscrupulous businesspeople who obtain your email address in one of three ways:

1.  They obtain it directly from you, or a friend or an acquaintance, who gives your email address either voluntarily or involuntarily directly to SPAMMERS. On certain websites you are offered various incentives for giving your personal information, and sometimes the personal information of friends and acquaintances. Internet users are duped into volunteering far too much important data, like their Name, their Email Address, their Street Address, their Phone Numbers, and their Credit Card Number!

Your email address can be obtained involuntarily from the internet by companies that use programs to "harvest" email addresses from usenet messages that are posted on News Groups, embedded in websites and used in chat rooms. These harvested email addresses are generally sold for profit without any street testing.

It is a common fallacy that SPAMMERS can get your email address directly off your computer. "Cookies" can be sent to users and reread by websites in order to pass information, but personal information including email addresses cannot be passed involuntarily in that manner.

2.  They buy it. You subscribe to a service that sells your personal information to SPAMMERS. Many large ISPs sell their subscribers’ information in order to pump up revenue. Many websites that you purchase goods or services from, or that you subscribe to in order to receive free goods or services, sell the information you give them. Your information is bought and sold freely on the open market.

3.  SPAMMERS guess it. Using million name lists, SPAMMERS send email to a huge list of possible usernames in an internet domain, betting that they will hit on a large percentage. This is what is known as a Dictionary SPAM.

 

What can you do?

First of all, keep your personal information to yourself. Share it sparingly on the internet, and with acquaintances. The more you share, the more SPAM you are likely to receive. Share your email address only on respectable sites.

 

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Obtain a secondary email address from a webmail service such as hotmail or yahoo and give that address out on sites which require email addresses to obtain what you want, so their mail and the SPAM you get as a result of that transaction will not go to your regular mailbox.

Check the policy page on the website of your ISP regarding their policy of protecting privacy or selling personal information. Check the policies of websites that you visit often concerning their personal information policy also. Privacy in the 21st century will be a result of you personally guarding personal information and your right to privacy. ISPs, websites and other internet services which sell your personal information should be avoided.

If you receive SPAM regularly, consider changing your email address. Check with your ISP for their policy on changing your email address and your email information in your computer system. Changing your address will, however, only postpone SPAM from reaching you.

Never answer SPAM. If there is a link at the bottom of an unsolicited message that offers to remove your name from the SPAMMER’s list, do not reply to that message or click on the link. Chances are good that this is a Dictionary SPAM and if you reply, the SPAMMER then knows that he’s got a valid email address and a live victim. Your email address will immediately go into a more expensive class of email addresses for sale, and next week your SPAM count will double or triple.

Despite the attempts of local, state and federal governments, SPAM can’t be stopped by regulation. There are currently House and Senate bills being offered which would regulate and penalize SPAMMERS for their activities, but most of these efforts will be unenforceable, unwieldy and will not stop unscrupulous businesspeople from using email to send you unsolicited messages. [For more on this issue, visit CAUCE (cauce.org)].

When you receive SPAM, the best thing to do is dump it off your system. Just delete those unwanted messages. In Microsoft Outlook Express, if you click on the message to delete, then hold down your shift key and press the delete button, the message is deleted completely rather than sending it into your Deleted box.

 

Better yet, in most email programs you can automate the deletion of SPAM so that you never even know that you even received any. When you receive a SPAM message in Microsoft Outlook Express, click on the message in your inbox, then click on Message on the Toolbar. There choose Block Sender or Add to Junk Mail List (depending on your version of Outlook Express). Then delete the message using the method listed in the previous paragraph. This should effectively delete messages from these SPAMMERS the next time they come to you. If these choices are not available in your version of Outlook Express, obtain the newest version to allow you to filter out these unwanted messages. Other email packages such as most versions of Eudora also allow for filtering of junk mail or SPAM messages. Consult the help files for activating this feature in other email packages.

Report repeated SPAMMERS and especially repeated pornographic SPAMMERS to your ISP. They often can enable blocking for these unwanted messages that keep coming through.

Finally, don’t be a SPAMMER yourself on any level. Obtain permission to carry on email conversations. Help preserve the email medium to keep it from becoming a place that internet users avoid rather than enjoy.

[Jim Youngquist]