Less
Spam
You want
no spam in your mailbox? You are not alone. Email used to
be just the perfect replacement for snailmail: direct, fast, cool.
But today, spam has become so ubiquitious that many citizens of cyberspace
find that up to 90% of their daily emails are spam or - the technical
term - "unsolicited bulk email (UBE)". But how do these
spammers get your email address anyway?
Where
do the spammers get the email addresses?
A recent
study of the Center for Democracy & Technology
(CDT) uncovered some interesting information: As you may have guessed
already (especially if you have your own homepage) in most cases spammers
find addresses for their huge collections on webpages. Of course they
do not visit your page and copy the address to their files. They use
specialised search robots that, similar to the web search engines
you know (Google, Altavista, Alltheweb, ...). They filter email addresses
out of the pages automatically and ad them to the address databases
used by the spammers. Also, once in a database, addresses will often
be sold to other spammers and added to more databases.
The CDT's report
on their research:
Why Am I Getting
All This Spam?
Unsolicited Commercial E-mail Research Six Month Report
http://www.cdt.org/speech/spam/030319spamreport.shtml
Since you are
interested in reducing the spam arriving in your inbox, your address
is probably out there somewhere already. So does that mean you are
lost? Certainly not. There are measures to reduce the spam in your
mailbox:
- Don't
give your private or office email address away on websites when
signing on for a free service. Always use a seperate address
for such purposes (free email services are perfect for this).
- When signing
in or filling order forms on the web check for "smallprint"
options that say you are willing to receive advertising
emails by the company you are dealing with and/or 3rd party. Deny
this always!
- Never
use the "option" to sign-out of a spam mailing you received.
Your reply will only confirm to the spammer that your email address
is active and he often will sell it as "confirmed" and
"opted-in" address.
- Use
spam filters on the mail server, if you can (Spamassassin
is a wellknown free and open-source tool for this).
- Use
spam filters in your email client program (Mozilla Mail
has a very good one! See Mozilla.org
for details + download)
- do not publish
your email address in a way robots can easily harvest.
Spam-me-not!
But how can you
do this? You need to publish your email address for potential customers,
business partners, employers or friends? This is where Spam-me-not
comes in. This little JavaScript encodes and thus "obfuscates"
your email address so that spammers cannot easily harvest it from
your web pages with their search robots.
