Fighting the Spam plague

One of the downsides of using email is being bombarded by spam. Personally I don’t mind receiving the occasional unsolicited email from company XYZ advertising products ABC, but when one is forced to wade through variants of the same email advertising the same dodgy stock, questionable pharmaceuticals, lottery scams etc, then it becomes extremely annoying, especially when these emails are received in large quantities.

One is forced to check through all emails received, including the spam, just in case a legitimate email is hidden somewhere between 100 messages espousing the wonders of some or other stock. Fighting spam poses a significant cost to any organization, either directly from the extra loads on administrators and employees as well as recovering emails falsely identified, or paying for the waste of bandwidth and addressing security risks posed by phishing, scripts and viruses. For more detailed information on spam click here.

While tools to fight spam are continually being improved, Spammers always seem one step ahead of efforts to eradicate it. This could be compared to the chemists employed by athletic “drug cheats” who also always seem one step ahead of the authorities. For example, Spammers use techniques such as embedding their “message” inside graphic images, using unique random email addresses so that all emails come from a unique source and, finally, filling the email with random words with no set pattern. This means that each spam email is unique with no obvious identifying characteristics, making it very difficult for standard anti spam methodologies to block. This also makes it very difficult for users to know whether an email is legitimate or not.

Lately, Spammers have also become more aggressive and are using viruses to recruit "zombie machines" for Spammers. The zombie machines are mostly unsuspecting victims' PCs, which have happened to contract the virus, opening them up to Spammers, who can then route spam emails through their machines.

Annoyances aside, however, the main aim of spam seems to be bypassing the filtering tools and getting users to open emails, rather than about getting them to "buy" the message contents. Surely this is missing the point because no one in his/her right mind would buy from such a source, so why do it? And how do Spammers make money from spam? Well, further reading shows that the spam business is in fact quite lucrative. See economics of spam for details on why Spammers do what they do.

What to do about spam
So this brings us to the question, what do you do about spam without giving up on emails altogether. Here are a few suggestions too help make the spam plague a little more tolerable:

1. Use an email service provider that has SPAM filtering tools.

2. If you are receiving huge amounts of spam, it might be worth changing your email address (discontinuing the current one) and emailing all your legitimate contacts with your new address. Drastic action, I know, but one way of getting rid of excessive spam in one fell swoop.

3. Ensure that your email address does not appear on websites etc where it is accessible to Spammers. Also be wary about using it when filling in forms on untrusted websites, chatrooms etc.

4. Use free spam filtering software tools such as Mail Washer which allows you to create white and black lists as well as to delete spam on the server before it is downloaded to your PC (Pro version with better functionality available for $37). Or you can use a filtering system such as Spamcop to filter emails automatically.

5. Ensure that any “invalid emails” that are sent to email adresses linked to your web domain are deleted, rather than sent to a default email address (especially true if you are the domain administrator for the website).

6. Change your website to use forms rather than emails for customer enquires/orders.