Understanding Spam

Posted : 15 Aug 2002

You have probably recently noticed an dramatic increase in spam or junk email over the last year or so. This is a world wide problem effecting virtually everyone with an email address. As this spam is often quite obnoxious (financial scams or sex sites) it is quite a concern to parents and also embarrassing under a wide range of circumstances. Unfortunately with the Internet being a world wide resource (even though the US thinks it owns it) any one country making laws against spam has little or no impact. It is too easy for a spammer to set up a server in a country with little or no regulation and be virtually immune from prosecution.

How do spammers get email addresses?
- from domain name records
- from web browsers as you scan their sites
- from other spammers
- from programs (called robots) that scan web pages for email addresses
- from hacking into servers and stealing email lists

What makes them even cheekier is that they often relay their spam through other legitimate servers thereby making it harder to track down where they come from.

Here are some ideas that might help to minimise the amount of junk you get -

Use fictitious email information in your web browser (various cookies and web based scripts can send this info out to hackers and spammers). Tough to do if you use Netscape to manage your email)
If subscribing to anything on the web always uncheck the box that says can we send your email to anyone else
Never reply to any junk email or go to any web site they list
Never reply to the unsubscribe email - it doesn't work and you have just validated your email to them
Turn of Java and Java script in your browser. Might be tough
Turn off cookies, although some legitimate sites force you to have them on
Have a junk email address (a hotmail account is perfect for this) for those situations where you must give out a valid email address
Change email addresses whenever things get too bad
Never spread or pass on chain emails

There are more advanced methods using filtering of email headers amongst other things but these are beyond the scope of this short email. Have a look at this link for lots more useful information -
http://www.macintouch.com/spam.html

There are several major attempts (legal and technical) currently underway to slow the spread of spam down although stopping it is probably the impossible dream. Hopefully these ventures will have some impact.

As more information comes to light I will let you know. If you are getting a lot of junk and you using Horizen as an ISP or domain name host, I can issue you another email free of charge. If you use another ISP then get them to change your email, although they might charge you for the privilege.