Spam - How It Happens and How To Stop It
 Chances are, if you use email on a regular basis, you will know
first-hand about Spam - junk email that finds its way into your Inbox. It is
a big time-waster as you are forced to delete all of the unwanted messages that
can often contain explicit and offensive material.
What To Do
The first thing to note is that you should never reply to any spam messages that you
receive, or click on any 'unsubscribe' links that may be in the message.
By replying to the messages or clicking on the Unsubscribe link, you are
telling the spammer that you have a valid email account that is being
regularly monitored, and you will continue to receive spam emails, often
more frequently than before.
Silence is the best defence - just continue to ignore and delete these
messages. They will still continue to be sent to your Inbox, but at least it
should not escalate. Replying to the messages with threats of legal
action or other threats will not stop the messages from being sent - it is
very difficult to track down the true sender of the spam emails, and the
spammers know this - they are relatively anonymous on the internet and can
cover their tracks well, avoiding legal action.
How It Happens
There are a number of ways that your email address can get onto these lists, and sometimes
there's little you can do to prevent it from happening. Some of the ways you can get on
these lists are:
- Signing up to a disreputable website, whereby you enter your email address
to receive information, or 'free access' to a site that might normally
charge to view its content. Be very wary of any website that asks for
personal information such as your email address, credit card details, or
other contact details - make sure you read any privacy statements the site
may have, and stay away from deals that seem too good to be true!!
- Someone who has your email address uses a link on a website to 'send this info to
a friend' - the website owners then have your email address logged, and can sell this
information to spammers.
- You may enter your email address onto an unrelated website, and again your email
address gets sold to a spammer who starts sending email to it.
- Virus infected machines can send many emails using your address as the
"from" address, which can end up on spam lists.
- A joke email or chain email that is forwarded around will typically contain all the email addresses
of all previous recipients when it is forwarded on - if this email finds its way into
a spammer's hands, it has your email address in there and they start using it to send
junk to. If you forward emails that are not of a business nature to
others, consider using the BCC field for the recipients, and delete existing
senders and recipients from the body of the message - this will help to
reduce the number of email addresses that a spammer can potentially get their hands on.
- Advertising your email address on your website. There are
specially made utilities that spammers use to automatically scan over the
contents of websites to look for email addresses. By having your email
address publicly available like this, you make it easy for spammers to
access it. Consider advertising an alternate email address, such as
'sales@mydomain.com', which can be more easily changed at a later date if
required. There are also tricks and techniques that can be used to
'hide' your email address from these programs, but still make them usable to
people browsing your site. With most email accounts, you can specify a
number of aliases, or alternate addresses which can be used for
purposes such as this. Give your friends your main address, but use an alias
for advertising on websites or signing up to online services.
Stopping Spam
As with many things in life, prevention is better than cure - it certainly
pays to be vigilant about how and where you use your email address on the
internet, but unfortunately in some cases there may be nothing you can do, as
someone else may indirectly provide your email address to a spammer.
Sometimes, however, you must enter your email address to get the
information you need from a website (many websites now offer "free"
registration as long as you enter your email address). A common
technique that we use to access this information is to create an alias email
address (either linked to our actual mailbox, or via the tools that
Internode provide for accounts with them). For example
myname.junk.2005@internode.on.net will be directed to my account. At
the end of the year I remove the 2005 alias and add a 2006 alias. That
way we can safely change our "website email address" every year and never
key our real email address into a website.
There are two main ways to stop these emails once you start receiving
them:
- Change your email address. This can be a pain because you have to let all your business
contacts know your updated address details, which can be time-consuming and
a bit hit-and-miss as to whether you are able to notify everyone that needs
to know.
- Purchase some anti-spam software to filter out the junk. We have had good results
with a product called 'GFI Mail Essentials', which runs on your email server, filtering
the messages before they arrive at your mailbox. Anti-Spam software is still not 100%
effective though, and requires a bit of time an effort to configure and 'train' correctly
to identify what is spam and what is not. Still, with the software
correctly configured, we have seen spam filtering that is more than 95%
successful, resulting in much less spam ending up in your Inbox each
day.
Spam is a big problem, but if you manage your email address carefully,
you should be able to dramatically minimise the likelihood of you receiving
spam in the first place.
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