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Grog: the Green Moon Blog
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Grog - Green Moon Blog
Jun
13
Written by:
John Dukovich
Wednesday, June 13, 2007 7:00 PM
Has SPAM got you down? Are you having trouble weeding through the inane and bogus offers in your inbox as you try to find legitimate e-mail messages? I think everyone is affected by SPAM.
There is not one silver bullet to defeat SPAM (other than ditching your e-mail account and going back to snail mail). However, there are multiple strategies you can use to combat this modern-day vermin.
First, let's quickly go through how you e-mail address gets into a spammers database.
- If you purchase retail products online, it is likely that the retailer may sell your e-mail address to an e-mail harvester. They collect millions of e-mail addresses and load them into databases which they provide to spammers.
- Another way for your e-mail address to be absconded is for it to be harvested off of a website. If you post your e-mail address on the web, expect it to be gobbled up by automated programs ("bots") that crawl across the web looking for e-mail addresses. If you post your e-mail on a "contact us" page, if you respond to a message board, comment on a blog, or post an article where you e-mail address is in plain sight, you are just providing bait to the greedy spammeisters.
- If you go to a phishing website and provide your e-mail address you will be spammed. Worse, the goal of phishing sites is to get more sensitive information from you (social security numbers, credit card numbers, etc.).
- If you receive spam in your inbox and you reply to it, click a link in the message, or simply have your inbox set up to automatically show the images embedded in the message, you are telegraphing to the spammer who sent the message that your e-mail address is valid and active and you may get added to a "super spam" database. Expect a lot more spam if you fall into that category.
- Something that is difficult to prevent is when your e-mail address is in someone else's electronic address book and that address book gets invaded by spammers who suck out all of the e-mail addresses like a leech sucking blood.
So, how to prevent (or at least reduce) SPAM. Since SPAMmers get your e-mail address in a variety of ways, you need to use a variety of methods to make their lives harder.
- To prevent retailers from passing your email address around, get yourself a free e-mail account from Hotmail, Yahoo, or Google just to name a few. Use that free e-mail account for your retail purchases and not for anything important. You may need to check it once in a while to keep it active or if you need to print out a receipt, but other than that let the spammers have their way with it.
- If you need to post your e-mail address to a message board, blog, or some other such interactive system, use your free account for that too. Better yet, only post to systems that don't expose your e-mail address to their sites. If you must post your official or business e-mail address, disguise it something like: name-no-spam@address.com. and tell people to remove the "no-spam" part to contact you. This is a generally accepted practice in the geek world.
- Regarding phishing sites, don't click on links in e-mails that are suspicious. When you visit a site, ensure the URL in the address box looks legitimate (e.g., if you think you are on PayPal but the URL is something like PayPal.purchase.ru, get away from there quickly. Never supply your social security number or bank or credit card account information unless you have gone to a site "clean", i.e., you open your browser and type the URL www.citibank.com (be careful with the spelling). More tips on anti-phishing are here. Since there are so many phishing spoofs of PayPal, check out PayPal guidance here and here.
- To reduce your vulnerability to spam that does still find its way to your inbox, use several layers of protection. If you use MS Outlook as your e-mail client, you should use their junk e-mail filter, which is actually pretty good. On top of that, you can use another anti-spam system such as the free ones listed here.
- To reduce the likelihood of your e-mail address being compromised by being in someone else's inbox where it becomes vulnerable, only provide your official business e-mail address to those who you interact with professionally. Similar to the free account I discussed getting for retailers, you may consider getting a free account for friends and other non-business contacts. It's all about controlling the places your official e-mail address goes.
You should never post your e-mail address on your business website. The common practice is to use a "Contact Us" page where the user fills out a form and clicks a button to "send" you an e-mail. Behind the scenes a PHP or ASP type of script is used to process the form and then forward the information to your e-mail address, never exposing your e-mail address to the public. If you must post your e-mail address, there are several JavaScript masking techniques that you can use to reduce the likelihood of a bot scarfing up your e-mail address, although these techniques are not 100% effective, they will do a lot to make it harder for your e-mail address to be discovered. You can try this one, or this one, or this one. (There are many more to choose from.)
Let me know if you have questions or need help with any of these techniques. Would you like to send me an e-mail? If so, contact me!
Copyright ©2009 Green Moon Solutions, LLC
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