Posts Tagged ‘email’

More anti spam tips.

Wednesday, December 26th, 2007

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

    Tags: , ,
    Posted in War on Spam | 1 Comment »

    Find out where your spam is coming from!

    Wednesday, December 26th, 2007

    Tired of spam in your Inbox? Well, here is something VERY useful I have found out and decided to share with you.

    Here’s a scenario for you.

    You’ve just made a new email account. You decided to sign up on SomeRandomWebsite.com, because it looks cool. You fill in your name and email address(which they swear upon their grandmother’s lives NEVER to divulge) and a few other details. Then you go to some other websites and do the same. Then a few days later you are getting email from organizations and people you never heard of, most of which are offering to give you Viagra? Who is sending you these emails?

    Well, lets find out shall we?

    All you need is a gmail account and some spare time. Don’t have a gmail account? Sign up here. Be sure to choose something easy for you to remember, like yourname@gmail.com.

    Now, next time you sign up for something and have to provide an email address, you are going to have to use your gmail account. Only with a little “twist”.

    We are going to use this little secret:

    Say you want info on an offer by Jason, and Jason wants your name and email address so he can send it to you.

    Well, great! Give him that email address(but your going to have to add something).
    Say you made or have a gmail account called: givemespam@gmail.com

    So what email address are you going to give ‘ol Jason?

    givemespam+Jason@gmail.com

    Now don’t panic. This is the secret part…when gmail sees the + sign in an email address, it ignores everything to the RIGHT of the plus sign(and the plus sign itself). So givemespam+Jason@gmail.com is treated in exactly the same way as givemespam@gmail.com. This is called Plus Addressing(a very good tutorial on this here)

    That means if Jason decides to sell/give your email to ViagraForEveryone Inc(that dosen’t exist, I hope), and they send you an offer, you will know who gave your precious email away.

    How? Well, just look at the top of your received messages, and it should say something like “ViagraForEveryone To givemespage+Jason@gmail.com”.

    I’ll be sure to try and find out more tips like these, so check back! I hope you found this useful :)

    The Elonta team - The visual startpage

    Tags: ,
    Posted in War on Spam | 7 Comments »