WHITE PAPER:
How to Defeat Spam
AND TAKE BACK YOUR INBOX
Over the past several months we have been busy upgrading our web server, improving security and mail services including filtering of unwanted spam mail. This document outlines how you can “take back” your email box. We will explain what we are doing and suggest some actions you can also take on your own. How well all these actions and techniques will work for you will depend upon how much you think spam is a problem and how much time you want to spend to avoid it.
Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam
The name spam, incidentally, came from the Monty Python skit of the same name. Some users see spam as a slight annoyance, while many people are so deluged with spam that they are looking for ways to limit or stop spam from arriving in their mail boxes. One thing for sure, spam won't decrease any time soon, it's too profitable a business.
If you use our server for your email account, you may have noticed emails are arriving in your in-box with a subject header ****SPAM****. This is our server’s spam filter catching junk mail. As much as we do, spammers are getting smarter, finding ways to by-pass these filters, using bogus email addresses and other spoofing techniques.
Several clients asked us why we don’t just delete the spam before it gets sent on to their email box. The simple answer is “One person’s spam is another person’s email”. For example, every day I get one or two solicitations for buying a hot new stock. To me, these emails are spam. To a day-trader, they may be his or her bread and butter!
Common questions are “How did I get on so many junk mail mailing lists?” or “How do spammers get my email address?” Several years ago, the Center for Democracy & Technology decided to find out. Their analysis indicated that e-mail addresses “posted on Web sites or in newsgroups attract the most spam”.
When emails are visibly placed on public Web sites or newsgroups spam-bots are able to read those addresses and forward them to Spammers. Spam-bots are software harvesting programs that use as web robots or spiders to record e-mail addresses listed on Web sites.