Spam Email Q & A

 
Q: How did I end up on these spam lists in the first place?

There are a number of ways to harvest email addresses such as:

By you innocently entering your email address details on their website.
By them configuring a ‘bot’ to troll its way across the internet in the same way Google does, and anytime it finds an email address it writes that address to a file. So if your address is listed on your website, then you are a prime candidate for spam.
Guessing email addresses by combining common first and second names. That’s why it pays to choose an unlikely email address.
Initiating bogus chain letters that ask you to add your name to a list and then email the list back to the originating sender once the list is full.


Once one spam operator has your email address, they will trade it with other spam operators for cash or for another reciprocal email address list. In essence, once the first bit of spam arrives, you can be sure that the volume will increase.


Q: How do I combat spam once I am on a list?

This is a really hard thing to do. A lot of spam email has a link at the bottom that supposedly will unsubscribe you from their list. They do this because it is Federal US law that they put the link there. Unfortunately, most of the time if you click on the unsubscribe button then that just tells the spam operator that the email address is still live, so they put you on a high volume list for even more spam!! The Federal Law specified that the unsubscribe link must exist – not that it should work!



There are methods to fight back though. For one example, the Junk Email feature in Outlook 2003 (and Exchange 2003) is proving itself to be very accurate at detecting spam. There are, however, many third party tools that can also detect spam at the email gateway and do some other useful things like add disclaimers on outgoing emails etc.



Q: But what do I do if I really do want to subscribe on a website, and I am not sure how reputable they are?

The way that I combat this situation is by using my Hotmail email address whenever I subscribe to a website that I am unsure of. My intent is to dump this Hotmail account once I receive an unacceptable level of spam. So far I have been using this Hotmail account for over 4 years, and I still only receive a tolerable level of spam – mostly because of the accuracy of Hotmail’s spam detection. By the way – Microsoft used the Junk email filter in Hotmail to develop the algorithm that is now embedded in Outlook and Exchange. Talk about a comprehensive beta test site!!!

Hope this helps!! Keep on emailing!

Paul Eddington

KB Keywords: CANN SPAM act email list junk filter combat fight mass flood