Spam

Spam-me-not

Spam is unsolicited email. Most people tend to think of it as unwanted email, but not wanting it doesn’t mean that you didn’t ask for it. There are very few online merchants who will not send you email after you purchase from them, even those who offer you the chance to opt-out of it. But there are a few things that you can do to keep yourself from becoming a “spam magnet”.

First and foremost, never do anything with unsolicited email except delete it. It’s tiresome, but it’s the simplest solution. The spammers aren’t going to get tired of sending it to you, but opening spam can verify that the spammer has found a “live” email address if your email system supports return receipts and the spammer has requested one. And whatever you do, don’t EVER click any “unsubscribe” links in an unsolicited email. While the original spammer MIGHT remove you from their email list, you have just verified that there is a live person attached to your email address and you can bet your sweet bippy that your email address will be sold to others.

The second thing you can do is to create one or more “spam-trap” email account at one of the free online email services such as Hotmail, Yahoo, or the like. Give your real email address to friends, family and colleagues and use the spam-trap for anything that you do online. This will eliminate the vast majority of spam from your personal email account, but not all of it. Even though I’ve been very selective about who gets my personal email address, I still get somewhere between 5 and 10 spams per day in my personal inbox. But it’s much easier to delete those few than the hundreds that show up in my spam-trap accounts.

The online freebie accounts aren’t really free. They make their money off of advertising and they’re pretty good about cancelling an account when you don’t log in for a while (if you don’t log in, you can’t see the ads). You can sometimes set up Outlook to log in to these accounts, but it’s becoming more difficult. My Hotmail accounts, for example, are old enough that I can still do that. New accounts have to pay for Outlook accessibility. And unless something changed when I wasn’t looking, Outlook Express can only work with Hotmail.

Many of the security suites come with anti-spam tools. In simplest terms, anti-spam tools work on a “whitelist” or “blacklist” basis. In a “whitelist” setup, everything is assumed to be spam unless you say otherwise. Whitelist approaches are very good at keeping spam out of your inbox right from the start, but also put a lot of legitimate email in the spam folder until you can “educate” the program as to what’s permissible and what’s not. Under the “blacklist” approach, everything is assumed to be legit unless you say otherwise. You start off having to deal with the normal mounds of spam, but eventually most of it winds up in the spam folder.

When those approaches are coupled with other methods like scanning subject lines or the contents of things that you have identified as spam, you get a fairly effective tool. If you’ve ever wondered why you get emails with subject lines that read something like “Ch3ap V!AgrA,” it’s a spammer trying to get around those tools. So far, not a one has made it past my anti-spam utility, but they certainly keep trying.

Keep in mind that these antispam tools are client-side applications and are generally good for home use. I wouldn’t want to bet my business email services on them.

And fer cryin’ out loud, folks, don’t buy anything from spammers. It’s one thing to go to a merchant’s website, find what you need and buy it. It’s something else entirely to follow the link in an email. When you do that, even from merchants that you normally do business with, you just prove to them that their spam tactics are profitable.