Dealing with spam (junk e-mail) April 2001 "Spam" refers to unwanted, junk e-mail--messages offering mortgage information, weight-loss schemes, investigation services. No doubt you get your share. I get maybe about four or five such messages a day. Considering that my Internet address is all over the 'Net, it's not surprising that I get spam. I shop online, post to newsgroups, and enter my e-mail address into virtually any online registration form that asks for it. It's a surprise that I don't get more than I do. I've had frustrated Internet users ask me what to do, and I was at a bit of a loss. But now I'm going to direct anyone who asks to quite a good report on CNet. The report covers four areas: how to prevent spam, how to evade it, how to defend yourself against it, and how to report it. The primary approach to prevention is to use multiple e-mail addresses and reserve one of them for your most important e-mail. Many people simply set up an e-mail account on a free web-based service such as Yahoo and then use that whenever they're required to provide their e-mail address in an online form or when they're posting messages on the Internet. That way, they can make sure that only their friends and colleagues have access to their real e-mail address. Sneakemail and SpamMotel offer a related approach. The latter service lets you keep your actual address anonymous and gives you a "fake" address that you can use. They will forward e-mail that arrives at your fake address to your regular address. And you can send e-mail via their service in order to keep your real e-mail address private. To avoid spam, you simply regularly change these "disposable" e-mail addresses. SpamMotel is somewhat similar to a web-based e-mail account except that it forwards to your regular e-mail account. Another useful tidbit in regard to prevention is to never reply to spam. Unscrupulous spammers often simply use your "unsubscribe" command as a means of verifying that your address is correct. You can partially evade spam by activating a feature in your e-mail software, though in my experience it didn't work all that well. In Outlook Express, for example, look for the Junk Mail Filter under the Tools menu. Also, if you're receiving regular messages from an unwanted source, you can simply set up an e-mail filter so it goes directly to the Deleted Items folder, which works well. You can also defend yourself from spam by using a fee-based blocking service such as Bigfoot or free software for the PC such as Spam Buster or SpamKiller, a shareware program for $29.95. © 2001 by Jim Karpen, Ph.D. |
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