By Keith Newman
spam (sp m) n. 1. A trademark used for a canned luncheon-like
product consisting primarily of pork pressed into a loaf. 2. Unsolicited
e-mail, often of a commercial nature, sent indiscriminately to multiple
mailing lists, individuals, or newsgroups; junk e-mail.
A significant ramp up of junk mail arriving in private and corporate
inboxes this year alongside an increase in virus activity is causing a
good deal of frustration with many people wondering what they can do to
curb the onslaught.
The level of unsolicited commercial email, direct marketing flyers
and other electronically transmitted junk is rapidly reaching overkill.
The US-based American anti-spam group Coalition Against Unsolicited
Commercial Email (Cauce) estimates there has been a 30 per cent increase
in spam this year. Research company Jupiter Media Matrix suggests at the
current growth rate the average mail box will be inundated with an
average of about 1500 junk emails a day by 2006.
Don’t wait for the Law
The US Federal Trade Commission, is getting about 15,000 complaints
about the junk mail issue daily and is trying to figure out what can
legally do done to stem the tide. The problems is sending bulk emails to
people you don’t know is not illegal and so far only a few court cases
have begun to set any tone. The responsibility it seems largely lies
with the internet community itself to provide a backlash.
The nature of the internet being a one-to-many medium has given those
without a conscience the ideal tool to propagate their often odious
campaigns with little more effort than selecting a database of millions
of email addresses and hitting the send button.
Often the perpetrators are trying to make their money back after
having been sucked in to spam mail themselves such as How to Make a
Fortune on the Internet. Perhaps they’ve purchased a CD on-line of
100, 000 “verified, genuine, eager” email recipients who’re just
waiting to be mass marketed to. The fact is most of these email
addresses, possibly including yours, have been illegally harvested off
the internet, stripped off newsgroup postings (Usenet) or acquired using
sophisticated Spider search engines which harvest addresses from web
pages visiting all the links they encounter.
In the early days spam was perpetrated by individuals didn’t
realise or care about the clutter created and chaos caused when their
messages are passed around the world. One could normally reply
appropriately to have them cease. Nowadays the more insidious
culprits are organised companies who know exactly what they’re doing.
They often hide their identity while making a business out of
discovering yours and targeting you incessantly on behalf of their
clients. Reply to one of these emails and you are asking for
trouble.
Unfortunately junk mail or spam is one of those activities that grows
organically as those behind unscrupulous marketing and sales campaigns
harvest email addresses any way they can in the belief they’re
increasing their chances of winning new business.
Then there are non-commercial uses of spam which can include:
Chain letters. Do not pass on chain letters promising luck,
blessings, financial windfalls if you pass this message on to another
seven people. They’re simply time wasters so do yourself and everyone
else a favour: trash them.
False virus alerts. While private and business users should be ever
alert to the growing threat of viruses, worms and Trojans infecting
their systems through email there’s no excuse for not having
anti-virus software and automatically updating profiles on a weekly
basis these days. If you are unsure about whether to believe the message
that’s just been passed on to you about a deadly new virus threat on
the lose check with Symantec (www.symantec.com),
or The WildList ( http://www.wildlist.org/
) to authenticate virus warnings before passing on paranoia.
A recent spoof message said it all: “If you receive an
email entitled Badtimes, do not open it, delete it immediately. It will
erase everything on your hard drive, delete disks within 10 metres of
your computer, de-magnetise your credit cards, re-programme your VCR,
leave the toilet seat up and drink all your beer.”
What to do with SPAM or unwanted junk mail?
Before complaining you should consider whether or not you may have
unwittingly subscribed to this unwelcome intrusion. Often you have
become part of a spam list because you signed up for a service or had
dealings with a specific site and failed to un-tick the ‘do you want
to receive special offers’ form when you submitted a form or placed an
order. These are often pre-set to ‘yes’
The simplest, quickest and most effective solution to junk email is
to simply hit the delete button. The risk is that silence can sometimes
be considered assent and they’ll just keep coming and increasing in
number as the months go by, taking up more and more of your valuable
time and disk space. If you can ignore this and realize this is just one
of the uncomfortable side effects of being on-line all well and good. If
you want to fight back there are other options.
Do not reply to spam! Some junkmail messages have an
"unsubscribe" option where you are politely told you can be
removed from the list that you ironically didn’t subscribe to in the
first place. If you know the source of the offending mail is a
legitimate business that you have had dealings with but no longer wish
to receive mail outs the chances are this unsubscribe option is
legitimate and will be acted on. If you continue to receive unwanted
mail then respond asking why they did not take you off the list.
However if the source is unknown to you it is best not to respond as
even clicking the “unsubscribe” is confirming that your email
address and more than likely validating yourself as a legitimate target
for more junk mail and possibly means you email will be onsold to other
direct marketers. I learnt this the hard way recently and got 30 junk
mails from Asia the very next day. Read the filters section below
to find out what I did about it.
And to see what happens if you do reply to spammers and show interest
in their products, read the story at www.latimes.com/technology/la-000037171jun30.story
(You will have to register as a user of the LA Times site to access the
article.)
Filters
Firewall and Email Server Filters
Organisations with an IT department or with managed security through
an application host will likely have firewall or email server settings
in place to detect not only viruses, but also junk email.
Problems can arise with the fine tuning of the filters in place as often
email from legitimate senders can get caught up requiring a call to the
IT department to have it released.
If you are in a smaller business or if your IT department
does not have filters in place then here are some of the other options.
3rd Party Filters
There are a number of software programs to help detect and block junk
email by reading the email and header content before they arrive in your
inbox. I now use Spam Buster http://www.contactplus.com/products/spam/index.htm
It was of the most popular anti-spam software downloads in 2001. Spam
Buster can block, mark or delete email based on both the rules that you
set up (eg block any mail from @spammer.com), as well as over 17,000
email addresses of known spammers from their database.
You download the program and it sits in front of your email
application (Outlook in my case) and ‘marks’ suspect email.
You can then go into Spam Buster and either delete or OK the suspect
emails and adjust the rules it uses to analyses messages. When you
launch your email application the ‘clean’ emails download.
Because the program sits in front of the email application it can
intercept viruses and saves time and space on downloading junk email.
Well worth the $19.95 USD investment and you can download a trial
version at the above URL also.
Microsoft Outlook filters
If you have wisely guarded you email address and only receive the odd
junk email and use Outlook you can automatically divert future unwanted
emails from that sender to another folder or the Deleted bin.
Follow these instructions:
- Click Inbox
- Click Organize
- Click Junk E-mail.
- To change the folder junk messages are sent to, click Turn off in
the first bulleted item.
- For either bulleted item, click Move in the first box, and then
select a new folder in the second box. To see a list of all your
folders, click Other Folder.
- Click Turn on
This means that anything you mark as junk email, by right-clicking
the message and adding to the junk senders list (see below), will in
future go to the folder you selected in 5. above.
How to mark email as ‘junk email’ so the filter re-directs it
You can right click on any message, then in the pop-up box,
roll your mouse over ‘Junk Email’ and then select “Add to Junk
Senders list”. This will ensure that any further emails from
that particular email address will be moved to the folder you selected.
In my case, it’s straight to the deleted folder, to be cleaned out
regularly.
-
2 More Loopholes
One way spammers can get messages through is to change the email
address by using a different combination of characters before the @
sign. Having added this email to the junk senders list previously
will not filter this as the email has come from a new address,
despite the fact that the domain is the same. However,
Microsoft Outlook users who have the Junk Email filter switched on
(see steps 1-6 above) can filter all future messages from the
spammers domain name by adding them to the list of filters in the
filter.txt file saved on their hard drive.
Another way spammers can get around these filters is to use a
completely different domain address, in some cases re-routing
messages through a proxy server. There is little you can do
about receiving this email unless you run software like Spam Buster,
which has previously added the sender’s domain (or proxy) to their
filter list.
- Click START (bottom left of most screens)
- Select FIND
- Select FILES OR FILTERS…
- Insert “filters.txt”
- Select the ‘Filters’ file and at the bottom of
the filters list, add the following line with the domain name of the
spammer:
From contains "@spammer"
For info on other email application filters, use these links:
Finding Out About The Sender
Often hitting the reply to sender button will send your email
bouncing back to you. Spammers have anticipated your angry response
and don’t want to be re-spammed by you. Some junkmail generators
use a dummy return address to bounce replies. Their real address
will be somewhere within the body of the message or hidden in the
header information of the sent mail. If the message references a web
page, you can often find the real address or the owner of the server
there, and direct your comments to them.
To find the senders email address:
- Eudora: With the email open in Eudora, click on the
BlahBlahBlah (sic) button in the toolbar.
- Netscape Mail (3.0): Open the Options menu and select Show All
Headers.
- Netscape (+4.0) Open the "View" menu and select
Headers.
- Outlook and Outlook Express: Right-click on the email address
to get a drop-down menu. Select Properties. Select the Details
tab and the full header appears in the window.
- Pine: From Main Menu, select Setup, Rules, and use the ?Help
system to see how to set up the system.
Reporting to the sender’s ISP
If you suspect the individual responsible is a customer of
another ISP, forward the email message with all header information
to their postmaster or abuse email address. Send the complaint with
the full header to any or all of the following email address
formats: postmaster, admin or abuse @isp.co.nz, . com or .net.
If you don't get a proper response from the postmaster you can
look up admin information using Whois from Internic. A web interface
to whois is located at http://rs.internic.net/whois
, Enter the Domain and see who the related person and email address
associated with this is.
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