Fighting The War on Spam
Protecting your Online Privacy
For all of you, who get so many questionable pitches in their e-mail everyday, believe it or not there is hope. As e-mail travels across the Internet, It keeps track of where it’s been. At the beginning of every e-mail there is what’s called a full message header. In the full message header is the IP address of the computer where the e-mail originated from, and the host names and IP addresses of every computer that held the e-mail on it’s way to your ISP’s mail server. The reason that you don’t see the full message header is because most e-mail client software hides the full message header but the full message header can shown very easily depending on the e-mail software.
Most of the time the address in the From: field in a spam e-mail won’t be the true e-mail address of the spammer. This is called forging an e-mail address. If you get spam that really offends you or spam from the same spammer over and over again then it maybe worth reporting the spammer to their Internet service provider. The first place to look at what comes after the @ sign in the spammer’s e-mail address. Go to the website for the Internet service provider or free e-mail provider, they will have a special abuse e-mail address where you can report your spam or any other unwanted, pain in the neck e-mail. When you e-mail Internet service provider or free e-mail provider you will need to send a copy of the e-mail including the full message header of the e-mail. If it appears that the originating e-mail address has been forged, Then you’ll have to look in the message header for the first host name in the message header. Go to the web site for whatever host name and look for any e-mail support addresses and e-mail them that you believe that a spam e-mail originated on their system and include the e-mail including the full message header.
For many years with the popularity of the telephone answering machine, people screen their phone calls so that they decide to answer the calls they want, and not answer calls from telemarketers, collection agencies or any other unwanted callers. There are a variety of utility programs that let screen your e-mail in a similar way. With these e-mail screening programs, a list of the e-mail on the mail server is shown, one can choose delete the e-mail, send a bounce message back to the spammer saying that their e-mail cannot be delivered because of an invalid e-mail address, or let your regular e-mail client software download the message. The best of these programs that I’ve tried is called Mailwasher, it can be downloaded from www.mailwasher.net. Before discovering this little gem of a program, I used to get 10-15 spam e-mail messages a day. After a few months of using Mailwasher I only get two or three spam e-mail messages a day.
Spammers collect e-mail addresses through newsgroups, and web pages. When a spammer collects a list of hundreds or thousands of e-mail addresses they start sending spam. E-mail addresses are immediately removed from the master list if the messages bounce due to a nonexistent e-mail address. That’s why I found that using a e-mail screening utility program has been one of the only things that reduces spam e-mail. Most spammers provide an ‘unsubscribe’ method, a way a spammer says that they will take you off of their list. Unsubscribing using the methods that spammers give won’t take you off of a list it just puts your e-mail address on an even better list of people who read spam e-mail right to the end of the message. This is the list that gets sold to even more spammers. Instead of getting less spam you just get more. No matter how much you get spammed, do not unsubscribe.
Screening e-mail and bouncing the spam, and reporting spammers to their Internet service providers are the only two things I have found that been successful in controlling spam. Go ahead and reclaim your e-mail, because you can.