Spam is flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force a certain message on people who would not otherwise even think about it. Most spam is commercial advertising, often for dubious products, get-rich-quick schemes. Spam costs the sender very little to send, so there are many spam senders out there.
Email spam targets individual users with well… mail messages. Email spam lists are often created by scanning classified posting, stealing mailing lists, or just searching the Web for addresses. There is also another technique I have heard of; just simple guessing. For example, if you have and email like “katiexox@hotmail.com” you’ll be sure to get more spam than “apple9guy1@hotmail.com”.
The basic rules to minimize and maybe even avoid spam:
If you own a website, or post classifieds ads(or maybe on forums), you probably post your email address along with that. Well, spammers typically use special programs(bots, similar to the one Google uses, but not as advanced) that extract email addresses from Web sites and classified postings. To avoid ending up on a spammer’s mailing list when you go to post on some newsgroup, or classified ad, obscure your email address by inserting something obvious into it. For example, if my email address is john@gmail.com, I can modify it to read john@gm[delete_this]ail.com
For another interesting tip, see “Tired of spam in your inbox?“
Never reply to spam messages, even if they tell you they will “remove” you from their mailing lists if you reply. Replying will just confirm to the spammers that your e-mail address is nice and active, and you will probably receive even more junk mail.
Remove your email address from your website’s pages and provide a web based mail form instead. This way spammers can’t send robots to your page to harvest email addresses and put them on their mailing lists(but watch out for comment spammers! I’d recommend to build your own form and insert a captcha n it. reCAPTCHA is a very good one). If you don’t care about that, or don’t have the programming knowledge, here is a good form generator (its free!).
Another basic tip is using the reCAPTCHA Mailhide. reCAPTCHA Mailhide helps you protect your inbox by asking people to solve a reCAPTCHA before they can view your email address. The reCAPTCHA can only be solved by humans, so this stops spammers from gaining access to your email address through automated programs. An example is: john…@example.com. (notice the …?)
Well, thats it for now. Hope this has helped you in some way.
The Elonta team - The visual start page
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Tags: email, spam, tips
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, December 26th, 2007 at 9:20 am and is filed under War on Spam.
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December 26th, 2007 at 6:06 pm
Wewt. Keep up the good work, I like these spam articles. Maybe you should write one on if spam actually works(as advertising for the companies). That would be really interesting.