How to Effectively Deal with Spam

'Spam' is e-mail which has been sent unsolicited in bulk. The word 'spam' should be written 'spam', not 'SPAM' - 'SPAM' is a tinned meaty product.

Do you receive junk e-mails regularly? E-mail adverts which don't seem to be intended for you? Junk e-mail which you haven't asked for?
Or are you looking to try and prevent getting 'spammed'?

If it's any of the above, you have come to the right place.

This article explains the best steps to take to avoid spam, fight spam or block spam.


Try to Avoid spam

If you are new to the Internet, and have a new e-mail address, you can take action now to minimize the spam you would normally expect. If you already receive a lot of spam it is still worth taking the following points into consideration to avoid getting even more.
The below guidelines are designed to minimize the opportunity a spammer has of finding your e-mail address, if you have a very guessable/obvious e-mail address then avoiding spam will be more difficult as e-mail addresses that short and sweet are almost always valid, and spammers know this.

Open a second e-mail account (such as Hotmail) to dedicate to potential spam.
Do not display your usual e-mail address in Newsgroups, Chatrooms or Forums, use your second e-mail for this.
When signing up for any Internet offers or filling in surveys on websites etc. always use your second e-mail address (you can always change the e-mail address to your real one later for certain mailing lists if you are sure they are not a potential spam origin).
Try to avoid displaying your e-mail address on your website, if possible use forms and server side languages to enable your visitors to contact you.
NEVER reply to a spam message or use the 'remove me' links (this validates your e-mail address is in use).
NEVER buy anything advertised using spamming techniques, or visit a website advertised with spam. Not only does this tell the spammer he has a valid e-mail address, but also that spamming works!

The above steps will stop spammers being able to find your e-mail address so easily. Because when you submit your e-mail address to a site, that site could be offering a service purely to collect valid e-mail addresses to sell to spammers. I'm not saying everywhere do this, but a lot do - that is the purpose for using a second e-mail address, you will be able to determine what sites seem to be passing e-mail addresses on to spammers without your main e-mail being disturbed.
Spammers also use 'Website Crawlers' to search for e-mail addresses, these are programs which automatically browse the internet looking for pages displaying something@something.something (that's a bit of a crude explanation, but you get the idea). These 'robots' will normally look in forums and message boards where there are a lot of people who have their e-mail address displayed publicly.


Block Spam Messages

Most e-mail clients have built in features which allow you to specify filtering under certain criteria you specify in order to block spam messages. This does not affect the sender in any way, the spammer will happily spam away not knowing you are never even seeing any of his/her messages.
Outlook Express is a common mail client, to block spam effectively follow the below points;

Go to 'Message Rules' from the 'Tools' menu (also sometimes 'Inbox Assistant' or 'Rules Wizard'. In here you should be able to click 'Add', or something to that effect, and specify what criteria you want to specify and what action(s) you want to take.

Using a bit of common sense you should be able to work out how the message rules work, Eudora also has this feature ('Tools' then 'Filters'? I dunno, work it out). Here are a few example rules I have found to be effective;


If the To or CC line does not contain YOUR E-MAIL ADDRESS then delete from server.
If the To or CC line does not contain YOUR E-MAIL ADDRESS then make status 'read' and move to deleted items.
If the From line contains 'known spam domain' then delete from server.
If the To line is 'known spam mailer list' then delete from server.

The idea of the first rule I have mentioned above is to avoid all messages not addressed directly to you, I have found this to be the most effective as a lot of spammers will send the message to one dummy address (validity of this is irrelevant) and BCC all the 'real' recipients. BCC means Blind Carbon Copy, so you will receive a message that does not look like it is intended for you. Most Internetters will never be BCC'd in proper context so blocking these types of messages should block a lot of spam.


Combating spam

Spamming is illegal, so you are perfectly within your rights to take evasive action if you have received mail you have not asked for. It can be tricky though. A spammer will often exploit someone else's mail system in order to send the mail anonymously, the best thing to do in this situation is to contact the owner of the vulnerable system alerting them that they need to secure their server. To do this you need to decode the message headers. To find the message headers right click on the message in your inbox and go to 'Properties' (this is for Outlook Express on Windows), Mac users; 'View' then 'Source', Eudora people should see a 'BlahBlahBlah' button somewhere.
Typical message headers look like;

Return-Path: <powerloan2000@yahoo.com>
Received: from mail.anon.net (mailer.anon.net [192.17.101.5])
by mail.anon.net (Exchange)
with ESMTP id LQU02891;
Thu, 7 Feb 2002 15:14:54 GMT
From: <powerloan2000@yahoo.com>
Received: from yahoo.com ([203.56.26.170])
by mail.anon.net (8.11.3/8.11.3) with SMTP id g26FEiH01756;
Thu, 7 Feb 2002 15:14:45 GMT
Date: Thu, 7 Feb 2002 15:14:45 GMT
Reply-To: <powerloan2000@yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <005a05c33kjh$2688e6e0$2eb42ec3@plghjj>
Subject: !
MiME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1"
X-Priority: 3 (Normal)
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0)
Importance: Normal

In the first 'Received' header you will see your incoming mail server, in the lower most 'Received' header you will see the all important origin of the mail - always go by the IP address given in here, the name can be forged. You can find out the responsible person for that IP address from the RIPE Whois db - which you can search from my Search Page, or by digging up some info on it using Spade, Neotrace or other IP lookup tools. Make sure you are doing a WHOIS search, not a normal web search.

If the IP address matches the networks that the advertised site within the spam are on, then you can contact the site owners threatening legal action (if you wish), if you demand £100 for them wasting time and resources you will probably get it.

Follow the bellow links for more help on spam;

www.spamhaus.org
www.mail-abuse.org