What is Spam?

Spam is unwanted email sent from people you don't know regarding things that you don't want to know about or attempting to sell you products or services that you have never expressed an interest in. It is estimated that 85% of the email traffic today is spam and is responsible for millions of hours of wasted time searching through the junk to find the "good" emails. Spam is not email selling products from an organization or web site you have agreed to receive mail from.

How Did I Get on the List?

There are many ways that your name may be included on a spammer's mailing list. Here are some of the ways you can get on a list:

Spam Harvesters

Very similar to search engine robots, spam harvesters are programs that crawl sites, going from link to link to find email addresses. When an email address is found it is added to the database of the harvesting site.

Domain Name Registrations

Similar to harvesters, there are programs that check domain registrations and add any contact email address information to their data base.

Signing up for Goods or Services

When you order goods or services from a company, whether it be internet based or not, you will often be asked for your email address and whether you want to be included on their email list for specials or updates. You may also find that they will ask if you would like be included on a list for "selected partners". It is always important that you check the privacy policy of the company or site you are dealing with, and only select to receive email from those you do want to hear from. Remember, the company or site you are dealing with and the "selected partner" may have an entirely different privacy policy.

Search Engine Registrations

Again, this is the same as signing up for goods and services. Be particularly wary of sending your email out to "thousands of search engines" or using automatic submission programs. You are often agreeing to receive mail by just registering your website. Not all search engines are guilty of this practice, but it does warrant a careful inspection of the privacy policy anywhere you are asked for your email address.

User Groups, Forums and Bulletin Boards

Many people agree to insert their email address in their signature on these groups which just happen to be a favorite target of the spam harvesters mentioned above.

Process Selection (Alphabet Attacks)

This is what we refer to as sending an email to every imaginable address connected to a domain in the hopes of finding the good ones. Often this is done alphabetically as in margaret@ martha@, mary@ and so on. Many spam mails now have scripts in them that contact the sender to notify them that the address was valid and the message was received and opened.

Your Address was Sold

You see it all the time - a CD containing a billion clean valid addresses for $20. Your email address could have been picked up by any of the above methods and then sold. Once that happens, another scoundrel will take the list and add it to a database and so on.

What Not to Do?

The human reaction is one of anger, wanting to stop the flood and maybe punish the offender. The obvious first step is to hit that button that says "to be removed" or some variation that sends an email back to the spammer. WRONG. All you will wind up doing is notifying the less honorable that you have a valid email address and your in the database that gets sold.

Although you may think it a good idea to report a spam mail to the senders ISP, many spam mails are sent with spoofed or invalid email addresses. You could actually be black listing an innocent party. Most of these types of complaints are ignored and very little satisfaction is gained.

If a website is referenced in the email, you could try contacting the hosting company. Depending on the amount of unwanted mail you could be attempting to contact several hundred a day which is another waste of time.

Do not use an auto-responder with your email address unless you are absolutely sure no one has it that you don't want to have it. An auto-responder basically says, "I am a good email address, sell me".

Do not forward email from one address to another. Often times you wind up forwarding spam and the receiving ISP may block all the email thinking your email address, website, IP or server is a spam source.

Avoiding Spam Harvesters

Simple answer...don't put your email address on your website. That's probably unrealistic for most so there are other options available which work with varying degrees of success. One is to convert you email address to Unicode in the html programming. It will still look good to the website viewer. Another is to use contact forms instead just displaying your email address. There are also java and php scripts which can hide your address. Whatever method you use, it may not be fool proof as spamming is big business and the spamming community is becoming adept at getting around these solutions.

Domain Name Registrations

You can't register a domain name without an active email account. However many domain registration sites offer "Private" or "Proxy" registrations which will keep your email address and your personal information away from prying eyes. NicFair Domains is one.

Spam and Signing up for Goods and Services

Be sure to read and understand the privacy policy. Without knowing who the selected partners may be we would recommend not choosing to receive email from them.

Search Engine Submissions and Spam Mail

Do not use bulk submission programs. Submit manually to all search engines and be sure you read and understand the privacy policy. You could also use aliased email accounts (see below) so if you do start receiving spam you know where it is coming from and you can just eliminate the email address.

User Groups, Forums and Bulletin Boards

Again, be sure to read the privacy policy. Also, most sites give you the option of displaying or not displaying your email address. Choose the second option and don't display your email address.

Avoiding Process Selection

Some web hosting companies (like 24-7 Webs) have what is called a default address. This is the address that is used for all mail that is sent to a non-existent email account. You can choose to forward the mail (bad idea), set it to ":fail: no such user here" which we recommend, or send it to ":blackhole:" where the email simply disappears without you ever seeing it. The only time this may be a problem is if people you want to hear from are consistently typing your address wrongly, but it is well worth the risk in our estimation.

Using Spam Filters

There are many after market spam filters available which you can buy and set up on your own computer. MS Outlook 2003 also has a built-in filter which works reasonably well if used properly and up-to-date, depositing suspected spam into a junk mail folder. Another alternative is to have server side or ISP filtering. The down side to this is that it will fill up a spam box on your account and you need to continuously be accessing the account by web mail and deleting the spam.

24-7 Webs uses a server side filter, rated as one of the best available by the way. When you choose 24-7 webs they will send you instructions on how to use your server side filter without having to fill up and monitor a spam box.

Don't YOU be a Spammer

Don't allow friends to have an email address on your domain unless you absolutely trust them. Don't use any kind of form script that does not have the recipient hard coded into the script. Don't buy into "We can send your information" scams.

and please DON'T EVER BUY FROM A SPAMMER

This is meant as a guide only and is certainly not a complete set of recommendations.