How do these spammers get my e-mail address?  Automagically by harvesting it from your web and mail activities.  Some lengthy but informative articles are at

http://www.cdt.org/speech/spam/030319spamreport.shtml

http://www.paulgraham.com/antispam.html

http://www.private.org.il/harvest.html

There is also a nice comprehensive site to learn more about spam, computer security, and using the Internet in general at http://www.getnetwise.org

To research laws on spam, visit http://www.spamlaws.com for a comprehensive list of world wide legislation.  The US section is broken into Federal or individual states.

Now that they have it, what can you do to reduce the amount of spam you receive?

1. First and foremost, never reply to an unwanted e-mail thinking that you will be removed from their list.  Even if there is a legal sounding disclaimer to "opt out" by replying, forwarding or visiting a web site, just delete the message.  Following the instructions will only verify to the spammer that they have hit a valid address and your problems will grow from there.  Congressional Bills S. 1618 / H.R. 3888 address an opt-out and attempt to address Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE), but there are plenty of holes.  More on these bills can be read at SpamCon Foundation.

2. Subscribe to a free yahoo or hotmail e-mail account. Many ISP's allow several e-mail addresses per account, take advantage of that. Use this address for completing web page registration forms. Also, look for and clear any check boxes that ask for your permission to share your information.

3. Only use your valid address with friends or business contacts.

4. If you are an AOL user, delete your profile.

5. "MUNG" your address.  If you are active in newsgroups, listserves, or UseNet, insert garbage into your e-mail address to make it harder to get harvested. Example: you@NOSPAM.yourdomain.  Although this is a commonly accepted activity, it does violate RFC's.  Details about munging can be found at http://www.faqs.org/faqs/net-abuse-faq/munging-address/

6. If your mail is with a corporate account, ask your mail administrator to budget and implement content filtering software at the gateway between the your corporate mail server and the Internet.  Alternatively, they could use SpamAssassin, a great open source product.

7. Make use of the tools included in your mail reader.  Write filters to delete or at least to move questionable mail into a folder you can read later.  There are also open source and commercial products to filter for you.

8. If your mail reader has a preview, turn it off so that unwanted mail can be deleted before the graphics get fetched from a server thus reporting that you are indeed viewing the message.

Spammers are worse than pond scum. They will do whatever they can to get their messages to as many people as possible. Don't think that new legislation will do much good.  A vast amount of spam comes from countries that couldn't care less about the laws of other countries.

There is a lot of grandstanding by politicians thinking they can legislate spam into the bit bucket.  There are also groups protesting this legislation as a First Amendment issue.  A search at Google.com for "spam legislation" returned over 5,000 hits!

While the extremists battle it out users must educate themselves and take matters into their own hands.

If you'd like recommendations on spam filtering software, see my Everyday Software page.

And,,, when you're totally fed up with spam, try to lighten up and enjoy it with this link:

http://media.smilepop.com/smilepop/flash/06_2002/may02-smilepop-soapbox2.swf (requires shockwave)

ENJOY!

Click HERE to mail a link for this document to someone.

Schmahl World Computer Assistance, LLC