How I fight SPAM
Updated : Feb 05, 2005junk mail
This is stuff you get by mail. See these two resources for ideas- http://www.obviously.com/junkmail/
- junkbusters
- another site on how stop penny saver and advo (these are the companies that send shopwise flyers)
- be carefull about
newspaper subscriptions. When you sign up for '6 weeks
delivery for
only $2.90' you are agreeing to receive promotions from that newspaper
and affliates (how else can they afford to do this?). Be sure
to contact their advertising department and ask to be removed from the
mailing list.
Here are a couple of newspapers I have dealt with.- San Francisco Chronicle : phone +1-415-777-7979, privacy policy, to opt out send an email to homedelivery@sfchronicle.com
- San Mateo County Times : phone +1-650-348-4321, contact details, send email to custserv@angnewspapers.com
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Don't give your email out
Sounds very counter intuitive, right? After all having an email (or many) is so that people can reach you. Not quite. I do not give your email addresses to people I don't know / haven't met.If I need to give my email address to to a total stranger, I give them a GMail / Yahoo / Hotmail address. When I get to know them, I'd give them my real address.
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Use temporary addresses
I use spamgourmet to generate temporary emails. Say I want to buy some memory from a small shop, I don't know much about. I don't want to give them my main email, b/c if they started spamming me (or sold to an spammer) I can't do much. So I give them a 'special' email at spamgourmet that will only accept say 5 messages. After that all messages are 'eaten'.The site is so easy to use, and once you signed up, there is virtually no maintanance. you don't even have to go to the site, to create your email. You just make up an address (within SpamGourmet rules ofcourse) and that is it!
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Use multiple aliases
Never use your primary email when signing up for web sites. Use special aliases. For example use 'amazon@yourdomain.com' when signing up for Amazon.com. This way, when you start getting SPAM for an alias, you can shut it down. Better yet, you'd know who 'sold out'.If you have your own domain this is very easy. Most of the hosting services now allow plenty of email aliases.
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Don't use MAILTO tags
SpamBots, will crawl webpages and harvest anything that resembles an email address. They definitly grab 'mailto' tags. So never have your email in plain-mailto format. If you want to leave your email,- Munge it : like
yourname@yourdomainCHEESE.org
And ask the visitors to remove the 'dairy product' from email address to reach you. Becareful, to munge the DOMAIN, not your name. As most of the hosting services will have a 'catch-all' address and you will endup getting spam. - have your email
encoded as an image like below.
- Munge it : like
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If you get SPAM any way, Filter it
I don't use this method, as I don't get much spam. Use spam-assasin or any bayesian filter. I am waiting for an integrated bayesian filter within Ximian Evolution. Mozilla Thunderbird has a pretty good adaptive Junk mail detection system built in -
Once you identified an SPAM, report it!
I use spamcop.net to report spam. This is as easy as it gets. you just forward the spam, as an attachment, and SpamCop will do the rest. And it is free.
Just reporting to spamcop will *not* stop/reduce spam. Use SpamAssasin and enable the 'Blocked List rules'. This way, spamassasin will check if the mail is from a blocked-IP. This way your submissions and others are being used.There are some controversy about SpamCop. So use your judgement. But as for me, I liked the service so much, I am a paying member.