How to Stop Spam
It is estimated that 70% of emails sent over the Internet are unsolicited commercial e-mail. When you consider that over 35 BILLION emails are sent every day, the impact of spam is staggering. Here's what YOU can do to stop spam today...
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Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam...
Spam ranges from relatively benign product pitches to blatant pornography and identity theft schemes, and mailboxes that are unprotected can quickly be overrun by spam, possibly causing the mailbox owner to miss important messages. CAN-SPAM, the US government's attempt at stopping spam, has been a miserable failure.
Email users are getting more spam than ever, both at work and at home. Rather than complying with the law, spammers are increasingly using zombie networks (computers hijacked with spyware) to send spam on their behalf. So how do you fight back?
Spam Filtering Options
Although the volume of spam has grown by more than 65% since 2002, a number of companies have stepped up to the plate with solutions. One of the best end-user solutions is Cloudmark Desktop, a subscription service that costs about $40 per year. Cloudmark analyzes feedback from all of its users to determine what most people consider to be spam, and moves those messages to a separate folder for quick review later. When a spam message does make it into a user’s inbox, a single click on a toolbar removes the message and adds that message’s profile to the Cloudmark database. With this dynamic system, Cloudmark is able to react quickly to new forms of spam, and claims 98% spam removal immediately after installation. Unfortunately, Cloudmark only works with Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express.
Popular and free web-based email services such as Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Google's Gmail all do similar collaborative spam analysis and attempt to automatically funnel unwanted messages into junkmail folders. Users can also create their own filters to block messages based on sender, subject or content. My personal experience with Gmail has been quite good -- several hundred messages per day are blocked, with very few false positives.
Impact of Spam on Business
For corporate networks, spam can become a financial burden. Considering the amount of time employees spend weeding through e-mail, as well as the amount of load placed on mail servers and the company’s bandwidth, the corporate cost of spam quickly climbs into the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, depending on the size of the company. A good solution for these networks is the Barracuda Networks line of anti-spam firewalls. Barracuda products sit behind the company’s Internet firewall, scanning each incoming message before passing it on to the mail server. Using multiple methods of analysis, the Barracuda products block over 80% of spam messages right out of the box. Within two weeks, following the configuration recommendations in the Barracuda documentation, that number can approach 95%, saving even companies with only one hundred mailboxes thousands of dollars per year. Since the Barracuda products do not have a per-seat licensing scheme, the return on investment for the products is very quick – usually less than three months, even for companies with only one hundred mail users.
Scorn Scum
Think about it... spammers do what they do because it's a lucrative business, not because they like to annoy people. So it stands to reason that people who buy stuff from spammers should bear a large portion of blame for the continuation and growth of spam. If nobody bought products advertised by spammers, the spam problem would go away within weeks. People who abuse the Internet and inconvenience millions of users by mass mailing their pitches should receive your scorn, not your hard-earned cash. If they flout the rules of the online world, they're most likely crooks in the physical world.
Protect Your Inbox
Of course, the best way for an individual user to reduce spam is to keep his or her main e-mail address private. Entering an e-mail address into any kind of public Internet forum or website exposes that address to discovery by spambots that harvest e-mail addresses from websites. One strategy is to get a free e-mail account from a webmail provider (such as Hotmail) and use that e-mail address for all website forms and public correspondence.
Though spam is a constant problem, it can be effectively controlled with the right tools and smart address management. In summary,
For further reading, see my articles How can I avoid computer viruses? and Spy, Counter-Spy to learn how to protect yourself from those risks.
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Check out other articles in this category:Posted by Bob Rankin on January 20, 2006 01:25 PM
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Most recent comments on "How to Stop Spam"
(See all 16 comments for this article.)|
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I would also recommend SpamBayes. I've been recommending it to friends and customers for a couple of years now. Very accurate and totally FREE. http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/ It cleans up what SpamAssasin leaves behind at the server level. On that note, SpamAssasin is a great server level engine. With some better professional filters added to it, it could be a best of breed solution. |
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Lots of good points raised. I've been using Spamihilator with Eudora. Much easier than all the Eudora filters, and its free. Uses Baysian, Lists, word analysis, etc. Sadly, I still have to review the spam as it occasionaly grabs something I need. A few suppliers use dumb email serving so I can't white list them. If you have a mail server though, check this review out: Thanks Bob! --David |
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I've had good luck with Spam Bully www.spambully.com |
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I admit I haven't read EVERYTHING you have written, but I haven't seen you mention the use of images embedded in emails which are used to validate addresses. As I understand it, some spammers send emails to "guessed" email addresses which include unique links to images on their server. If the image is downloaded from the server then they know they have hit a real, live, in-use email address - which can then be sold. The solution is to use an email client which does not download images until you ask it to (I use Thunderbird - which incidentally also seems to do well with it's built in spam filters). Thanks for all you do - I enjoy the Tourbus - and have learned lots! |
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I totally agree with KinKstar, but note that no-one has offered any constructive solution to their problem (since 2006!) EDITOR'S NOTE: Maybe that's because Bayesian filters and collaborative spam filtering are working for a lot of people. If you don't like the way Hotmail does spam handling, switch to another provider. Gmail funnels tons of stuff to my spam folder and I almost never look at it. It gets auto-deleted after a while... |
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In answer to "null" above, the "constructive solution" to the spam problem (now that BlueSecurity is gone) is KnujOn. Please go to http://www.knujon.com/ to read about it. KnujOn uses all legal means available to shut down the spammers. |
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One note on this is managing your spam catching points. Gmail has a decent spam filter and also lets you check it before deletion. The only brain-dead thing its done is mark bounced messages as spam. You can then have it forward to your POP account. But be sure to check the spam box occasionally. Add senders to your gmail address book if they have reliability issues. Eudora full version is now much cheaper (its left Qualcomm to become part of the Mozilla camp) and it includes a decent spam filter. The key thing though is managing points of spam filtering. You want it in one place where you can monitor it. My domain provider recently added a spam filter and turned it on by default, contrary to prior settings. It bounces messages it deems spam. (stupid) Theres no address book or rules to adjust. I only discovered this as I was forwarding some gmail there and it bounced back. Obviously this is a poor approach (doubling spam moving around the net and confirming your email address) so its now off. Spam control is back in my control. |
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It's not free (but not that expensive either). For Mac OS X I've found SpamSieve, http://c-command.com/spamsieve/, works very well. As far as I know there isn't a Windows version but its compatible with most Mac email clients. |
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Two comments. First, people like me who sometimes forward humorous e-mails or other items need to not only learn to use BCC, they need to learn that after you hit the "Forward" button (and before you click "Send") you should go through the e-mail deleting all the previous headers. They're full of details for spammers, they make the email huge, and they slow down the reading process when the email arrives. Second, some of us HAVE to put our e-mail addies on our websites. I do genealogy, and I need to hear from strangers who will turn out to have family data. I'm comfortable with my Hotmail and Yahoo accounts. When Nigerians offer me millions or I win a lottery I never entered, I use the buttons to tell my mail accounts those are spam e-mails, but most penile enhancement ads are recognized by Yahoo and Hotmail. |
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I am not defending all spammers but I will share this. About four years ago I did buy something from a spammer. My junk mail never increased and the product was good. I would buy from this operation again. I suppose I was lucky. I do not allow HTML in my mails which probably helps. I use a web based service operated by my ISP. EDITOR'S NOTE: You are part of the problem. Don't buy from spammers. If everyone stopped doing that, they would stop spamming. |
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