How to fight SPAM
Governments have been very slow and unresponsive in protecting the privacy of consumers. If the growing pattern of corporate lobbying and campaign financing is any indication, it's only going to get worse. So, that leaves you with the task of protecting your own privacy. This is a general guide to help you with an important aspect of Internet privacy: SPAM.
What is SPAM?
Don't ever click banner ads
Never give out your e-mail address
Never list your e-mail on your site or news groups
Don't ever reply to SPAM
Complain to the e-mail server admins
Filter out your SPAM
SPAM, for those who don't know, is another word for junk mail. Companies and unscrupulous individuals all over the world are using very intrusive methods to send you junk mail. So what? Don't we get junk mail in snail mail all the time? Yes, but there's more to it than that.
The Internet allows these companies to store you in databases that cross reference each other, so that they can build profiles of you that tell them what sites you visit, how often you visit those sites, how often you click banner ads, what kind of products you purchase, etc. Companies will gladly sell this information they collect to other companies, so that once your e-mail is on one list, they'll eventually be on ALL the lists. This is not science fiction. You are being tracked. What can you do about it?
Clicking banner ads on Web sites not only encourages marketing companies to continue their unscrupulous behaviour, but it also gives them tracking information about your habits.
Never give out your e-mail address
This is fairly obvious, but don't give out your e-mail address to marketing companies. This includes any surveys you may fill out, or any form you have to fill out when purchasing something over the Internet. For example, some companies require you to enter an e-mail address before you can download software. In these cases, always enter a bogus address.
Also, don't include your e-mail address in your Web browser settings. Use a fake one, or leave the field blank. Web sites you visit can grab that information without you ever knowing about it.
In cases where you absolutely need to enter a valid e-mail in a form (for example when you need the company to send you a receipt), you should have a second e-mail. This could be a Hotmail or Yahoo account, or any other account at the many free e-mail services on the Web. It doesn't matter if you get SPAM at that account because you won't be checking it very often. Think of it as a garbage bin account.
Never list your e-mail on your site or newsgroups
Don't list your private e-mail on your personal Web site. Use your second "garbage bin" account, or a separate "Web feedback" account. The same applies to any posts you may make on news servers. Marketing companies have automated programs that scour the Web and news groups to harvest e-mails.
You may be tempted to reply to junk mail asking them to stop. In fact, many junk e-mails provide you with an "unsubscribe" link, or ask you to reply with "remove" in the subject. Don't be fooled. Marketing companies don't actually know if your e-mail is active. They purchase thousands of emails from other companies and sometimes even guess at e-mail names. As soon as you reply to junk mail, they will know that your e-mail is active, and you will be prioritized on their lists, whether you like it or not.
Complain to the e-mail server admins
E-mails have to go through many virtual post offices before they get to you. Some of these e-mail servers are all too happy to take on the burden of SPAM in return for payment. But most of them don't like SPAM any more than you do. Most of them tend to provide SPAM blocking, but they don't always manage to catch all the SPAM. So, if you send the administrators of these servers an e-mail asking them to block SPAM that you may be receiving, there's a very good chance they'll help you out.
The first thing you have to do is show all the headers of an e-mail. Most e-mail programs offer a feature to show all the hidden information contained in an e-mail. This information shows how many virtual post offices your e-mail has travelled through. In Eudora for Mac, it's as simple as clicking the "blah blah" button. For other programs, check your settings for something that says "headers".
Once you have your e-mail showing all the headers, you have to forward that e-mail to all of the servers that your e-mail travelled through. This is the hard part. How do you know what e-mail to send it to? Well, have a look at the e-mail servers in this example header:
Return-Path: <gate-xx@firstserver.com>
Received: from fourthserver.com (66.35.240.33)
by yourdomain.com with ESMTP
(Eudora Internet Mail Server 3.1.2) for <yourname@yourdomain.com>;
Wed, 14 Aug 2002 12:46:37 -0400
Received: from thirdserver.com ([10.35.240.40]
helo=firstserver.com)
by secondserver.com with esmtp (Exim 3.22
#1)
id 17f1Ep-0007Bc-01; Wed, 14 Aug 2002 09:43:15 -0700
Received: from gate by firstserver.com with
local (Exim 3.02 #1)
id 17f1En-0003Zx-00; Wed, 14 Aug 2002 09:43:13 -0700
To: dailylist@firstserver.com
Precedence: bulk
From: Seymore Butts <seymorebutts@firstserver.com>
Subject: SPAM
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Message-Id: <E17f1En-0003Zx-00@firstserver.com>
Date: Wed, 14 Aug 2002 09:43:13 -0700
The areas you want to pay attention to are highlighted in red. These are the post offices that your SPAM mail has been through. Now you have to find the administrator's e-mail for each of these servers. In most cases, you can simply use "abuse@..." where "..." is the name of the server. So, in the above example, the admin's e-mail would be "abuse@firstserver.com".
If, however, that e-mail gets returned to you marked "unknown user", then you have to dig deeper. You do that by doing a Whois query. What the hell is that? It's a database that is open to the public, that contains contact and owner information for domain names. Here's one you can use: http://www.allwhois.com/
Simply type in the domain name (in this example, it would be firstserver.com), and it will give you the contact information you're looking for. Once you find the admin's e-mail, send a friendly complaint letter asking him/her to please block this SPAM sender. Note that you should also send an e-mail to your ISP's admin (for example, if your e-mail is hello@mydomain.com, then send an e-mail to abuse@mydomain.com).
For more detailed information about this and other SPAM-fighting resources, I recommend this excellent site: http://spam.abuse.net/
If you don't want to go through all the trouble of complaining to the administrators, then your only other option is to filter the e-mail that you receive, so that they never reach your in-box. Most e-mail programs have built-in filters that allow you to do this. Check your software manuals or help files for more information. Some e-mail programs use different names for filtering (for example, Apple's Mac OS X Mail program calls it "rules"), so look carefully. It shouldn't be too hard to find.
If you use Eudora, there's an online tutorial on how to set up filters.
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