Date: September 30, 2004
Subject: Dealing with unwanted email

If you receive email of any kind then you are almost certainly also receiving unwanted email, or spam. This month's bulletin will give you some basic guidelines for dealing with a problem that will all too often take up far too much of your time.

1) What is spam? Essentially spam is unsolicited bulk commercial email.

2) How do spammers get your email address? The most common method is by means of sending email to all possible addresses at a particular domain. Spammers also use harvester programs that scan websites and internet traffic for email addresses. Email addresses are also obtained when the information you supply to register a product or request a service (such as forwarding an internet article or sending an electronic greeting card) over the internet is shared with other organizations.

3) What can be done to keep your email address off of a spammer's list? Do not supply your email address to organizations with which you will typically not do business. Make use of an opt out feature if it is available. If opting out is not possible you have several options:

    a) Many online forms verify the email address by checking that it includes the "@" character. An email address such as notme@nocompany.com could be entered and in many cases it would be acceptable. You would not, however, receive any legitimate email  from this source.

    b) A throw away email address is also effective. This is a temporary email address that would be discarded when it becomes a target for spam. Management of this method becomes difficult after some time and regardless of its effectiveness your principal business email account will eventually become a target of spam any way.

    c) If your email address is published on a website it will almost certainly be harvested. To reduce the risk of this you could format your address so that it becomes more difficult to harvest (such as me@_deletethistext_company.com, or me at company dot com that most people could decipher but which would not be usable by harvester programs). You could also post your email address as an image. In either case, however, anyone wishing to send you an email must enter your address manually rather than clicking on an email link which may be undesirable in a corporate environment. For a more professional appearance a web form could be used on your corporate website so that visitors could easily send you an email and yet not have direct access to your email address.

4) Should you email the spammer to complain? Do not reply to the spammer, whether to voice your irritation or to have yourself removed from the spammer's list. All this will do is confirm that you read the spam inviting even more spam and possibly enabling the spammer to sell your address to other spam generators. In either case you benefit the spammer and cause yourself further irritation.

5) How do you prevent spam from taking up too much of your time? There are several options that you can use to minimize the impact of spam on your daily activities. You may never be able to completely eradicate spam but with the steps below you can minimize its impact on your productivity.

    a) Most email programs support filters which can be used to analyze incoming email based on sender, recipient, subject and/or message and process them accordingly by deleting them or moving them to a separate folder for further investigation (to ensure that valid messages do not get discarded along with spam messages). Consult the documentation for your email program to find out how to create filters that can automatically deal with many spam messages.

    b) If only a small group of people sends you email you can create a white list. A white list simply lists all email addresses from which you will allow your email program to accept email. Email from any other address will be deleted or sent to a special folder that allows you to examine it at your discretion to ensure that legitimate email is not accidentally discarded.

    c) If more people send you email than can be added to a white list you can create a black list. A black list is the reverse of a white list in that it will allow your email program to reject email from all addresses in the black list, it will only accept email from addresses that are not on the black list. Often, however, a black list is far more difficult to set up than a white list since the sending address of most spam will only be used once or twice before a new one is created, quite often a spammer changes email addresses several times a day.

    d) Third party products can be installed on your system to deal with spam without tying up your time beyond the initial setup. Many internet service providers offer similar services which can flag spam with a predefined subject line which your email program can then move to a specified location by means of a filter. Some of the resource pages listed below provide further information on these products and services.

    e) When all else fails and you find that spam is taking up several hours a day you may have no other recourse than to change your email address. This would be a last resort and is at best only a temporary solution as eventually your new email address will become accessible to spammers. If you choose this option notify your family, friends and business associates of the change and try to follow the practices listed above to minimize the recurrence of spam.

Other resources that may be helpful to you can be found at the following websites:

BigPond Article: Dealing with Spam

PC Today Article: How to Use Email to Get Rid of Spam

As always, please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions about this or any other issue.