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How To Prevent and Control SPAMIt’s morning. You open up your e-mail and there before you are 76 new e-mails since the last time you checked which was only about 8 hrs ago. You’re loved. You’re popular. People want you and need you. That may be true, but 72 of the e-mails are from people / companies that you don’t know. So, how do you stop it? Read on… THE REAL WORLD Alright, let’s first get an understanding of what we are fighting against here. It’s called SPAM or unwanted e-mails advertising services not requested and it’s something that everyone struggles against. Remember when junk mail in your mailbox was your biggest complaint? Well, it’s gone electronic and thought they aren’t paying postage, it still costs. How much is it costing? In 2007, Nucleus Research reported that spam costs U.S. companies $712 per employee each year. A $31,000-per-year employee spending 16 seconds each on 21 spam messages per day would cost about this much, according to Google's calculator. That adds up to about $70 billion per year in lost productivity, Nucleus said. Scary, huh? So why do spammers do it? You probably know the answer already, money. One ex-spammer speaking at the Spam Symposium in Europe in 2007 broke it all down for the audience. He went through all the numbers of the sales that actually occurred in a week (240 sales out of 40 Million e-mails sent) and what his costs were weekly to make that happen and showed the audience that he generated about $7500 / week by sending Spam. Why did he quit? It was killing his social life. As he put it, “it’s hard to pick up a girl at the bar and tell her that you send Porn, Pharmaceutical, and Mortgage Spam for a living. It kills your social life pretty quick.” I guess he was an honest spammer who couldn’t lie like everyone else in the bar. All this tells us that as the consumers, we aren’t going to see the number of Spam e-mails being reduced anytime soon. The money is there and the technology for doing it is too easy. There are companies that specialize in mass spam mailings and as long as they make money, they’re going to keep sending as well. SO HOW DO WE FIGHT? Well, let’s establish some more reality here. The tools and tricks at our disposable are not going to be 100% perfect. We need to establish a realistic goal of significantly reducing the amount that we are being sent each day. We aren’t going to be able to eliminate it completely, but we can make our lives a lot better. So what’s realistic? Well, if you’re getting 20 Spam messages a day, reducing that number by 15 would be a good start. So let’s say reducing it by 75%. Now we just need to put a battle plan in place.
STEP 1: PREVENT NEW SPAM FROM STARTING You’re getting 20 Spam messages a day, so let’s do a few things to keep that from going to 25 or more. Below are some tips to use that we’ve found from Spamlaws.com Don't participate in forwards and ask your friends not to send you them - Forwarded emails tend to list the email addresses of everyone who has forwarded the message, along with the email addresses of everyone they forwarded the message to. This is an easy target for spammers to find long lists of email addresses to target. Be especially wary of signing any sort of petition too, since these can be created by spammers for the list of names and email addresses. Use a complicated email address - The more complicated your email address is, the less likely it is to be generated for targeting by a spammer's software. Spammers' software normally looks for easy and obvious addresses first. If your e-mail isn’t already complicated, this may not be an option for you, so look at the next suggestion. Create alias email addresses - Certain services allow you to generate multiple, anonymous email addresses that forward to your real email account. You can even reply to forwarded messages through your email account and have it appear as though you are replying through the generated one. This puts a level of anonymity between you and potential spammers. A good idea is to create a new email address for every website that you disclose your address to. If you start to get spam through that address, you know where the spam is coming from and you can delete the address and eliminate the spam.
Some of the services we recommend include:
1. Mailinator = http://www.mailinator.com/ (FREE)
2. Mailexpire = http://www.mailexpire.com/ (FREE)
3. E4ward = http://www.e4ward.com/ (FREE)
4. Sneakemail = http://www.sneakemail.com/ ($2/month)<!--[endif]--> Read privacy policies before disclosing your email address - Don't register your email address on a website unless you know for sure that you can later opt-out from any emails they send you. Read their privacy policy to find this out and also to find out if they may sell or show your email address to a third party, who could very well be a spammer. Keep your home or business address confidential - Don’t give out your home or business address on registration webpages. Instead, use a service like Mailinator or Mailexpirer to create an address you use specifically for registration purposes. You should also do this when joining a listserv, message board, internet group, or when posting your email address on an online contact page, resume, etc. Don't give your real address for registration - If you can get away with it when registering on a website, newsgroup etc., use a fake email address. This will not work if you need to reply to a confirmation address though. In this case, use a service like mentioned above or an email address you create specifically for those purposes. Don't use your email address as your screen name - If you participate in chat/message boards or anything similar where you register a username, don't use the section of your email address before the @ sign as your screen name. This confirms a questionable email address to spammers, and they will often try to add "@hotmail.com," "@yahoo.com," etc. to create an email address (yours) to target. Disguise your email address - If you need to publish your email address on a website, even if it's an address that you have for that specific purpose (which you should always use when publishing your email address), disguise it so that spammer's software can't find it. You can do this by leaving out periods and “@” signs, and instead making it look something like this: "yourname AT yourdomain DOTcom." You can also make the "@" an image or use JavaScript to make your address a clickable link. Don’t click the UNSUBSCRIBE LINK unless you know the company or service sending the email – Most companies who send out legitimate e-mails abide by the CAN-SPAM Act which in 2004 stated how companies were to send out advertisement e-mails and what the restrictions were. One of the requirements is that the company provide an OPT OUT method (usually a link at the bottom of the e-mail) so that you can choose to no longer receive the e-mails. Large companies like Microsoft.com or CNN.com or e-mail services that companies use like ConstantContact.com will do this in order to be compliant. The problem is that the spammers who don’t obey the law will actually use this same requirement to “verify” that the e-mail they just sent the spam to is a legitimate e-mail. When they get a response to take the e-mail off the list, they do the reverse and add it to every list they have. So unless you recognize the company or service, don’t unsubscribe!
STEP 2: REDUCE THE AMOUNT OF SPAM YOU ARE CURRENTLY GETTING Now, in this step we have to ask a question: “How do you check your e-mail?” We ask that because the software or service you use will determine how you're going to fight it. See, some people go onto the Internet, open up a website like Yahoo.com or Gmail.com and just login to check the mail. Other people open up a program on their computer like Outlook, Outlook Express, Microsoft Mail, Thunderbird, etc. and get all of their mail to be delivered down to their machine. So the suggestions that come next will be based on how you do it. I CHECK BY GOING ONLINE TO LIKE AOL, YAHOO, GMAIL,ETC.
CHANGE YOUR SPAM SETTINGS – Most online services have a section in their system where you can change how strict they are about letting spam in to your inbox. By default, they are usually set to low or medium which will allow more spam in. Why? Well, they personally hate getting calls and e-mails from angry customers about an e-mail that got flagged as “spam” when it really wasn’t and the customer missed some important event or deadline, so they are willing to let more spam come through. Now, in defense of the e-mail providers, let us explain something. Please understand that the online providers don’t have people sitting there going through all the mail deciding what’s spam or not. They are using software that scans every e-mail going into their system that looks for certain factors to determine if the e-mail is spam and then gives the e-mail a score. If the score is higher than the software thinks it should be for a legitimate e-mail, it will flag it as spam. What’s something that will give an e-mail a high score? Having advertisements at the bottom of the e-mail for the e-mail service or another company. Any type of advertisement within the e-mail is going to give it a higher score than one with just text and a signature.
Going back though to the Spam settings, if you don’t know where you can go to change your settings so that it is more restrictive, then look for the HELP section of your e-mail service and type in SPAM SETTINGS or SPAM BLOCKING. This should guide you to where you need to go. I USE A PROGRAM ON MY COMPUTER LIKE OUTLOOK OR OUTLOOK EXPRESS
EDUCATE YOUR E-MAIL PROGRAM – Most programs will have the ability to “educate” or “train” the software to learn what is Spam and what is not. Now, the issue here is that this doesn’t keep the spam from coming down to your computer so much as once it comes down, it automatically moves the spam e-mail to either a SPAM FOLDER or to wherever deleted e-mails go. For some, this is good enough since they don’t have to waste time with going through each e-mail and deleting them. For others, they would rather not have the spam even come down and for those we’ll discuss that in a moment.
Junk Email Menu Option in Outlook 2003
Ok, so for most programs, to train the program, just RIGHT CLICK the e-mail that you consider SPAM, and you will see a choice in the menu that comes up about SPAM or JUNK E-MAIL. If you don’t see anything, take a look at the top of the program at the buttons and see if you see anything about SPAM. Again, if you still can’t find anything, go to HELP and type SPAM BLOCKING or JUNK E-MAIL.
Once you choose to tell the program that this type of e-mail is Spam, you may get the choice to mark just the e-mail sender or the entire company as being someone you don’t want to get e-mails from. If you choose “sender,” the e-mail address will have to match exactly for the program to know to identify the e-mail as Spam. If you choose “domain” or “company”, any e-mails that come from “@somecompany.com” will automatically be flagged. Again, only those e-mails that come from that domain or company will be flagged. If the spammer changes the e-mail address just slightly, it could get through and show up in your inbox. ANTI-VIRUS PROGRAMS CAN HELP – Depending on who you use for antivirus or antispyware, it may scan the e-mail for you and mark the e-mail in the subject line as SPAM to help you identify the e-mails better. Again, it’s giving each e-mail a score and it could flag a legitimate one as being SPAM, so you have to be willing to check your Spam folder occasionally for e-mails that shouldn’t be in there. SPAM FILTERING PROGRAMS – If you want to get even better filtering results than your e-mail program or antivirus program, you can install a program that focuses just on spam filtering. One of the best out there is Cloudmark’s DesktopOne, http://www.cloudmarkdesktop.com/. This is a FREE download that will install a toolbar in your e-mail program that scans the e-mail as it comes in letting it go to the inbox or the SPAM folder. So what makes this different than what you already have built into your email program? Mainly the accuracy and the lack of having to train it. It’s already “learned” what most consider spam and doesn’t need you to tell it. The FREE version only allows for you to scan one e-mail account and into one folder, so if you have multiple e-mail accounts being downloaded into something like Outlook or Outlook Express, you will need to upgrade to the professional version which is only $19.95 a year. WHAT ABOUT AT MY OFFICE? Companies have been struggling to find a way to curb Spam for years because they know that it does nothing but slow their employees down as well as bog down their servers. It costs companies money to store those unwanted e-mails along with the good ones, so if they can find a way to prevent them from even being delivered, they would be very happy.
Well, actually, a whole industry has developed around that need, but surprisingly, a lot of companies are still not using the services. Spam Filtering Service companies provide these benefits to companies and they do it a little different than what we’ve talked about so far. Spam Filtering Service Companies (SFSCs) actually have their clients e-mail routed to their servers first and then their servers pass the e-mails on through to the company. The SFSCs act like a “net” catching all the unwanted spam e-mails and let the good e-mails pass on through so their clients never see the bad ones.
So what about the questionable e-mails? The SFSCs actually send the individual users a summary e-mail stating which e-mails they are holding that they aren’t sure about and the individual user can quickly click on a link that says ALLOW beside each e-mail they want sent. The others are simply discarded away. And after a couple of times of this, the SFSC service learns what the individual considers good and bad and becomes even more accurate not having to send the summary e-mails very often.
Depending on the service, the prices can start at $2.25 / month per user in the company although the SFSCs usually have a minimum of employee e-mail accounts that they need to scan to setup an account, but often the numbers can be a few as 20 employees and with success rates of 95% and higher, that’s not a bad price for eliminating bogus e-mails.
Some of the companies that offer these services include:
1. Pristine Email = http://www.pristineemail.com/Pricing.html
2. MailWise = http://www.mailwise.com/
3. MailWatch = http://www.mailwatch.com/
4. AppRiver = http://www.appriver.com/
5. CudaMail = http://www.cudamail.com/
6. McAffee (formerly MXLogic) = http://www.mxlogic.com/ Our company has personally setup several clients with MXLogic, and they have all been very satisfied with the service and is the one that we normally recommend. We will tell you that the setup is a little more complicated than just downloading software. Actually, no software is installed. It’s just mainly changes to how the Internet knows where to send e-mails to get to your company which involves knowing how all this works behind the scenes. Again, we could start speaking “geek” here, but we’re going to keep using English. Just know that if your company is interested in doing this, we have the expertise to make it happen and very quickly with little interruption to the daily sending and receiving of e-mails.
Just feel free to contact us at 336-303-1730 or 1-866-800-4060 x4 and ask to speak to Ron to get more information. We just hope that this article has helped you learn some tricks and tips to reduce the amount of spam you deal with everyday and now you can reduce the burden we all seem to be stuck with for now and years to come. Sources used for this article:
http://www.spamlaws.com/prevent-spam.html
http://email.about.com/od/disposableemailservices/tp/disposable.htm
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tzink/archive/2008/08/28/how-much-do-spammers-actually-make.aspx
http://www.spamfilterservices.com/ |
