Stop spam and unsolicited e-mail
To anyone who uses e-mail as a means of communication, receiving “spam” will have probably become a regular occurrence. No,we're not talking about luncheon meat, but rather “unsolicited e-mail” or “junk e-mail”, offering you such things as prescription drugs, financial loans, get rich quick schemes or even access to pornographic websites, which is a particular worry if your children use the computer. In 2003 spam accounted for nearly 50% of all e-mail sent around the world and that figure is set to rise in 2004.
The reason that there is so much spam sent is that is it easy to reach thousands of people, at hardly any cost to the sender. Even with a low-response rate, it is quite easy for spammers to make a profit.
Where do they get your e-mail address from?
- Newsgroups and chat rooms. When someone starts using newsgroups and chat rooms, they often sign up using their real e-mail address. Spammers use software that can monitor the newsgroups and chat rooms and collect all the email addresses.
- Websites. If you are the owner of a website, then the chances are that you’ve put your e-mail address somewhere on your website for visitors to contact you. Spammers use programs called spambots, similar to search engines, which trawl the Internet looking on web pages for the tell-tale @ symbol which signifies an e-mail address.
- Businesses often use standard e-mail addresses such as sales@something.com, info@something.com or admin@something.com. Spammers will certainly try these generic e-mail addresses, as the majority of them will get through.
- Website owners may also have a “catch-all address” so that even if someone mistypes your e-mail address, the message will still reach you. This means that spammers can just try anything@something.com and their message will arrive at your computer.
- If you have a web-based e-mail account such as Hotmail or Yahoo, you might be listed in the directory of members.
- Signing up for an on-line service where you have to supply your e-mail address.
Sadly, once your e-mail address gets out into the public, it will be picked up and added to a mailing list. People then sell their mailing lists to others and you’ll start receiving more and more spam.
Email spamming is illegal in Europe, but this hasn’t deterred spammers and most junk e-mail comes from outside Europe.
How to stop receiving spam
Stopping spam is a very difficult task and there is no method that is 100% effective. But here are some suggestions for reducing it:
- Never reply to spam messages. Just delete them. Some messages will have a link at the bottom saying that if you no longer wish to receive messages from them, then click the link to remove yourself from their list. If this appears on a newsletter from a legitimate source and is something that you expected to receive, then this is an acceptable way to stop communication from them. However, if you never asked to hear from the sender and the e-mail is unsolicited, then by clicking this link, all you will be doing is telling the spammer that your e-mail address is active and they’ll just send you more!
- If you use a newsgroup or chat room, then don’t sign up with your real address. Use either a fake, non-existent address or use a separate e-mail address, to which you don’t mind receiving spam.
- If you run a website, don’t openly publish your e-mail address with the mailto: tag. Disguise your address in JavaScript code, html encoding or better still add a contact form to your page instead. Any websites built by us, will do this.
- Always read the small print. Whenever you fill in a form where you have provided your e-mail address, look for the opt-in/opt-out box where you specifically request that your details are not sold to third parties.
- If you have a Hotmail, AOL or Yahoo e-mail address, make sure that you aren’t listed in the public directories and use the built-in filtering facilities that they offer as part of their service.
- The most recent versions of Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express have filtering options to divert junk e-mail into a separate folder rather than your inbox. Eudora even allows you to delete spam before you download it. You may need to turn these features on. Have a look for the pages on 'spam' or 'junk mail' in the help section of your mail program.
- Use a spam filter. A filtering program looks at the origin of the e-mail as well as scanning the subject line and text of emails for keywords or for word patterns or word frequency and either directs the messages to a particular location, or deletes them before they reach your inbox.
Spam Filters
As part of our web hosting facilities we are pleased to offer Spam Bouncer as an optional extra to your account. Spam Bouncer scans all your e-mails before they reach your inbox. You have the option to either automatically redirect the messages to a specific e-mail address, bounce the message back to the sender or delete the message.
The cost for this service is £30 (+ VAT) per year, but you can expect Spam Bouncer to stop at least 98% of your junk e-mail reaching you. We believe that it is well worth the expense in the time you save deleting the messages manually. If you would like to know more about Spam Bouncer, then please feel free to contact us.