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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.
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.
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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]
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