Spam

Is your mailbox filling up with junk mail?

Once upon a time, "SPAM" was simply the brand name of a delightful luncheon meat product from Hormel Foods. Then came e-mail. The term "spam" (in lower case letters) has come to refer to unsolicited junk e-mail.

Sadly, there is no easy fix for the problem. Trying to filter or block specific return addresses is not usually very effective because the way spammers work is that they use a return address once or twice and then throw it away. And, neither the spammer nor his ISP is really interested in the fact that you don't want to get mail from them. The spammer wants to send out as much mail to as many addresses as possible hoping to get enough replies to make money even if that means cluttering millions of mailboxes in the process. He doesn't care if a million people are angry with him as long as a hundred buy his product.

The best thing to do when you receive spam is to simply delete it. Never reply to it.

If you send "remove me" requests or complaints this tells the spammer two things:

  1. your e-mail address is valid
  2. you read the e-mail you receive. Thus, you are the perfect target for more spam. In fact, now that he knows your address is good, it makes it a more valuable commodity that he can sell to other spammers.

Do not register at web sites where you can supposedly list yourself as not wanting spam. There are concerns that some of these sites are merely collection points run by spammers to obtain valid addresses.

In fact, many web sites you visit will ask for your e-mail address or other personal information. Consider carefully whether that site has a legitimate need for that information and what the risk is that they will sell or share the information with other parties. If you participate in newsgroups, bulletin boards, or chat rooms consider the risks of sharing your e-mail address with the world and be aware that spammers search these environments for addresses.

Posting your e-mail address on your personal web page helps people find you when they have a legitimate reason to contact you. But, it also helps spammers find you because they use automated programs to crawl the web searching for addresses.

Even if you never told anyone your e-mail address, though, you would likely still get some spam. Spammers know that most e-mail addresses are based on people's real names. So, they create huge dictionaries of names and variations of names, including initials and appended digits, to try to guess working e-mail addresses. Remember that the spammer doesn't care if the vast majority of the e-mail addresses he guesses don't actually exist. If he guesses even just a few real addresses it is worth it to him because there is no real cost to him for the messages that don't make it through to a real mailbox.

There are some steps you can take to try to filter your mail. Most e-mail programs, including IMail Web Messaging, have a filtering capability. In IMail Web Messaging, from your Main menu, pull down the "Personal Account Options" menu and select "Change Processing Rules".

spam

This will allow you to filter mail or direct it to specific folders based on the sender or content of each message. As noted above, however, spammers change their return addresses quite frequently. But, the big problem with filtering is "false positives", or filtering out some of the legitimate messages along with the spam. You must construct your filter rules carefully to avoid over-filtering and blocking messages that you really do want to receive.