The best way to handle Spam is to not get it in the first place. Once you get on the spammers lists, it's pretty much impossible to get away from it. For an example of how spam snowballs, see this writeup on what happens when a false address (probably by mistake in this case) was registered on a web page,and it turned out that that address was actually collected by someone else. Very educational, and a depressing example of what can happen once your email address gets Out There.
One of the most effective things to do is to limit who has access to your real email address. There are sites like Sneakemail and Spamgourmet.com that will give you an unlimited number of email addresses and forward messages that are sent to those addresses to one you specify. That way you can give a specific address to each company that asks for a registration email address, and track if they sell or trade it. Sneakemail does not provide standard mail servers that you can use to send and receive email.
There's a long list of how spammers get email addresses at Uri Raz's page.
Never respond to any spam, no matter how legitimate the "Remove Me" offer looks. And be aware that just reading spam can validate your address in some cases, depending on your email client and your security settings. Always read spam as plain text, and if possible, use a firewall to block your email program from using anything except the standard ports for email. And never, ever, under any circumstances support a spammer by buying anything advertised by spam. If you get a spam offering a product from a legitimate company (as opposed to a Chinese drug store) feel free to contact them and tell them what you think. And that you will never buy their product again. For more information see the boulderpledge.org. (Site is still under development).
You can also get free usable email addresses from sites like MyRealBox. Use those for everyday use and save your ISP address for your most trusted and important contacts. MyRealBox and others like them have mail servers that you can access from your regular email program. EmailAddresses.com has lists and reviews of Free and For Free email providers as well as Free ISPs. There's also an article reviewing some free email services at Lowendmac.com. And a list of free email services at Google.
There lots of information about Mail and News at ii.com, including a section listing IMAP service providers
and detailing the options they have for spam filtering. Added 06/20/03
Read the Privacy policy of anyone you sign up with. You shouldn't have to Opt-out of any lists or "sharing". That should be the default.
Many ISPs offer more than one email address per account. Don't use the primary account at all and set up secondary accounts for everyday use. If worse comes to worst, you can cancel that email address and create a new one.
When picking an email address, pick one that won't be subject to dictionary attacks. Fred@example.com is much more likely to get spam than Fred368p@example.com
If you get your own domain, you will get different email options depending on who hosts it for you. At a minimum you can probably get several (if not unlimited) email addresses related to your domain. Use them and change them as needed. Sometimes they will be forwarded to another address, sometimes you can use the email servers of your domain host. You can register and have a domain hosted for the price of a couple of fast food meals. I use Register4Less but there are many others available too.
Never, ever post a real email address to Usenet. Or to most private news servers. See the link for the Email Address Munging FAQ or my own shorter (and more recent) version. I once created an address just for a newsgroup. That address has never been used anywhere else, and only used once before I got spammed. It took less than a week for the first spam to show up. It ended up getting so much spam I closed it. Proper munging can minimize the exposure.
Think at least twice about providing an email address to web page or a joke mailing list or anything similar. At a minimum read their Privacy Policy carefully. And do your friends a favor and don't give their address out either, no matter how funny the joke is.
If you have a web page, munge your email address on it, or the spam bots will almost certainly harvest it. If you do it right, the bots won't be able to read it, but when someone clicks on it they'll still be able to use it. The first 6 links below will help you do it. Keep in mind that if you use a Javascript method, that people who aren't using Javascript won't be able to see it. And some methods aren't clickable, images for instance, which can be an inconvienience. So if you want people to contact you from your web page, you need to make it easy while protecting your address.
- Sam Schinke of the GRC newsgroups has written a small HTML file that will convert your email address for your web page to several other formats to hide it from spam bots. You can get it Here or from Sam himself. You can open it in a text editor to inspect it before running it if you want. Added 09/27/02
- A page with links to lots of ways of protecting an email address on a web page from spambots.
Added 03/26/06
- Another free program that will obscure your email address to put on your web page is Obscure.exe. The link is to the web page, not the exe file. Added 04/19/02
- And another program that will do the same thing is ECloaker Added 08/19/02
- Of course, you could always do it the hard way using the conversion charts from JSPayne or Gerald Brindle. Added 04/19/02
- You can also use the Email Encryptor from Jim Tucek, but visitors to your page will need Javascript enabled for it to work. Added 10/08/02
- For several other articles about why spam is a problem see Twowriters.net, spamcon, and Why spam is bad Added 12/29/02
- A list of things to Thank Spammers for was posted to a news group and is archived on Google and also posted on several web sites including LinxNet and California.com Added 03/30/03
- CERT has page about the effects that email spoofing can have. Added 11/18/04
- An article about spam filtering. Added 11/10/02
- Finally, if all else has failed, and you're getting inundated with spam, use a spam filter. I prefer filtering my own spam locally in case of errors. No spam filter is 100% effective, and there will be mistakes. If you have the emails locally it's a simple matter to double check occasionally, and correct any mistakes you find. With a local spam filter you just point your POP3 mail program at it instead of the mail server, and it collects the mail, then tags suspected spam, which you can then have your mail program use to sort it into a holding location to check occasionally. Training is simple, and more email makes it easier. POPFile. is free and open source. Added 11/30/02, updated 12/29/2002 K9 from Robin Keir is a small stand alone Windows program. It's been very effective for me for a couple of years now. Added 03/30/03
- Spamotomy has reviews of various spam filters. Added 12/28/03
Phone & Address Listings
BACK TO TOP
