For those of you who are new to the Internet, spam is generally defined as unwanted, un-asked for email, usually of a commercial nature. Sort of like your typical "junk mail," only much more annoying. Spammers are people who send out this "bulk email." Most people on the Internet do not like spam, nor those who perpetuate it. I've gotten so tired of seeing it that I have written a program that will keep most spam out of my email box and send the offending spammers a nasty note. For constant and persistant spammers, I also send copies to anyone who is responsible for providing the spammer Internet access.
Spammers seem to use the same techniques that the "people finder" services used to fill out their database. I talked about these services last week. They look thru mailing list archives and Usenet postings and pull your email address from the messages. Anytime you communicate in a public forum, your email is subject to being grabbed by anyone -- including spammers. The latest trick to thwart spammers is to put a "fake" from address in any email or usenet messages you send out. If you're using a news or mail reading client on the PC, this is pretty easy to do -- just change your 'from' address. If you post from a Unix shell account, it's a little more difficult to automatically do, but it's not impossible.
Unfortunately, these fake "from" lines can cause an inconvienance for those who really want to get a hold of you privately because of a posting on the Internet. In my case, I have my mail filter pick up these attempts and send an appropriate message back to the sender letting them know how to really get a hold of me. People can still get a hold of me, they just have to do a bit more work to do so. Some of the more "enteraining" examples of the fake reply-to addresses come from people with their own domains. For instance, the owner of rahul.net uses "dhesi@spams.r.us.com." My personal favorite basically says it all: "good.luck@ttempting.to.spam.schaft.com." In kind, I've set mine to "its.a.b@d.idea.to.spam.uplink.com"
One person took this idea to an extreme. He puts a fake email in his "from" address: "hey.look@my.sig.for.an.email.address". Then, he doesn't even put a parsable address down there (something of a user@domain format. Basically, in order for you to get email back to this guy, a reasonably intellegent human being has to figure out what his email address is and type it in manually. You can't even cut and paste it out of his message. I like the idea, but it's somewhat extreme.
Yet another person out there is trying to get the mail filters of the world to unite and share information. Ron Guilmette is working on his own "spam filtering" program that will allow users to share "blacklists" of known spammers with each other so that we can "allow people to work together over the Net and filter all this stuff out and finally put these [spammers] out of business.'' Of course, making information widely known about spammers is a double-edged sword. Once the spammers address is known and published, they can just use a different address to get around the filters.
Some ISPs and free email-services offer some level of anti-spam protection. The home-grown program I've made to protect myself from getting spammed suits my needs quite well, but does not go quite as far as one ISP I know of: a2i communications. They can, if you wish, scan all incoming email for certain "key words" that appear in most forms of spam and prevent them from hitting your inbox. You can specify just how agressively it scans. I don't quite go that far, though my program is flexible enough that I could do this sort of scanning if I wanted.
If you're tired of getting spam, check with your ISP or email provider to see what forms of spam protection they offer.
Some sites to check out:
Do you have a method you use to protect yourself against spam? Send me some email and let me know!