10 Tips for Reducing
Spam
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Junk
email, also known as Spam, has become a significant nuisance for almost
everyone with an email account. And as bad as it’s been, it is getting
worse: Earthlink reports that over the past 18 months, they have seen a 500%
increase in spam emails, to where it’s now reported that 45% of all email
can be identified as Spam according to anti-spam software vendor Brightmail.
Though laws exist and new
ones are being crafted to go after the spammers, don’t count on an immediate
disappearance of this scourge.
So what can you do, to
reduce the number of spam emails that you and your employees have to deal
with? Here are 10 tips to help you deal with this issue.
-
Don’t put your main
email address on a website. In a recent study conducted by The Center
for Democracy and Technology, 260 test email addresses were created as
bait for spammers, and used in various ways known to attract spam. The
study found that posting an email address on a public site attracted the
most unwanted e-mail – five times as much as for any other reason.
-
If you need to give
customers and associates a way to contact you electronically via the
web, do one of the following:
- Use a form on your
website that does not display your email address, but allows a website
visitor to still contact you
- Dedicate one email
address for website communications, so that only that address is likely to
receive spam. At least you’ll keep your main address from being exposed, and
incoming mail to your public address can be reviewed separately from your
main business email.
-
If you visit newsgroups on
the web, or register yourself on websites, don’t use your main email address
to identify yourself. Use either an alias, or if an email address is
required, dedicate one address, just like with your website.
-
If you receive a
junk email with instructions to unsubscribe, and don’t want to receive
anymore, do not follow the instructions for unsubscribing. Many times, this
just confirms that you received their email and your email address works
(and this leads to more Spam). Also, many times the unsubscribe function
doesn’t work because the Spam perpetrators already closed down and moved.
-
If
your email program has a preview capability (such as Outlook’s preview pane)
turn it off. By previewing an email you are actually “opening” it, and this
can tip off the sender that your email address works. There is also the
possibility of a virus infecting your computer if you preview an
email.
-
Configure your email program (such as Outlook) to segregate email that
looks like SPAM. Outlook has
a built-in junk email filter and rules can be added to look for telltale
signs of spam such as email that is not sent To: or CC: your email address.
-
Use
an Internet Service Provider (ISP) that blocks unwanted Spam email.
Earthlink
has the Spaminator and
Yahoo
has Spamguard. MSN / Hotmail and AOL both claim to block over 2 billion spam
emails daily. MSN 8 software includes a smart filter that becomes more
effective over time as it learns the characteristics of mail that an
individual customer regards as spam.
-
Use software that either blocks or
segregates email suspected to be spam. Depending on the size of your
business, there are various software and service solutions available to
reduce spam. For single workstations there are great free solutions such as
SPAMBayes**,
which learns over time what type of email you consider Spam. Symantec’s
Norton Antispam 2004 won
PC Magazine’s Editor’s Choice this year. It is also available as part of
Norton Internet Security 2004. McAfee sells a product called
Spamkiller.
For large installations there are products such as
Brightmail
(which is being used by Cox and MSN) and
Syntegra
(used by AT&T Wireless). If you decide to use one of the workstation
products, send suspect email to a “Spam” folder that can be reviewed before
emails are deleted,
just in case there is a “false positive” - an email you actually want that
was earmarked as Spam.
-
If you are receiving a huge amount of Spam, you may
need to consider changing your email address. In particular, AOL addresses
receive a huge amount of Spam because it’s easy to guess at variations of
common addresses. Acquiring your own domain name, creating a new email
address, not publishing it on the web, and not using it for web and product
registrations should result in much fewer Spam emails.
-
Take
action! Join in the fight to enact appropriate legislation to reduce Spam by
joining CAUCE (The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email –
www.cauce.org).
You can also report spammers at
www.spamabuse.org.
For assistance dealing with Spam, Contact Dave Peiser at
dave@peisersolutions.com
** To download SpamBayes, go to
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/spambayes/spambayes-1.0rc1.exe?download
