dealing with junk mail (SPAM)
what is SPAM?
SPAM is unsolicited bulk email often of a commercial nature that is sent indiscriminately to multiple individuals, mailing lists and newsgroups.
how to avoid SPAM?
There is no easy way to avoid spam if you use email; email addresses are collected from various sources, e.g. homepages, forums, newsgroups. Spam will generally fall into two categories, Traditional and Acquaintance.
traditional
This is where you receive an unsolicited email from an organisation/company/individual that you have never heard of who is trying to sell you something you might never want. They may have obtained your email address (and thousands more) from any of the following public locations:
- Newsgroups (Usenet)
- WebPages (i.e. that contain your email address on)
- Instant Messengers (e.g. MSN, ICQ)
- Mailing Lists
- Discussion Forums
- Chat (IRC)
These spammers may also append random words and letter combinations to your ISPs name, e.g. test@eftel.com, abc123@eftel.com etc in an effort to guess a valid email address. It costs very little for spammers to send spam, so they may try hundreds of thousands of combinations.
To try and avoid this type of spam you could use a web based email service like Hotmail which you can dispose of once your mailbox starts receiving too much junk mail without effecting you ‘real’ email address.
acquaintance
Spam received in this way is usually from someone you have dealt with, such as a website you have visited, it may also come from various ‘Expos’ held around the country, competitions, etc. Wherever you have been requested to provide your email address often there is an option somewhere to ‘Opt out’ of the mailing lists to minimise the amount of spam you may receive, but this is usually well hidden or not explained clearly. The common sources are:
- Product Registration/Warranty Cards
- Registering with websites
- Online purchases
You can stop this prevent this type of Spam by not using your real email address, instead sign up and use a free web based email service, e.g. Hotmail if you need to be emailed a verification link, or use anything@example.com which will send email into a black hole.
I am receiving email that is not addressed to me?
In 99.9% of cases the message has been sent to you; however your email address was hidden in the Blind Carbon Copy field (BCC). The 'bcc:' field is useful where discretion is required. People in this field are concealed from other recipients in the 'To', 'cc:' and 'bcc:' fields. They can themselves see others in the 'To' and 'cc:' fields but not the 'bcc:' fields.
For example, you might receive a message addressed to test@eftel.com (but your email address is myemail@eftel.com). Your email address was included in the BCC and therefore hidden giving the illusion that you were not the intended recipient.
can EFTel help minimise the spam I receive?
EFTel’s optional Spam tagging feature uses a sophisticated mail filter program that analyses all incoming mail to identify unsolicited commercial email or spam. EFTel uses Spam Assassin to perform this task. Spam Assassin requires very little configuration, you do not need to continually update it with details of your mail accounts, mailing list memberships, etc. It accomplishes filtering without this knowledge, as much as possible. It is however possible to over-ride SpamAssassins default behaviour on a per-user bases to provide greater flexibility for individual users.
Alternatives might include:
- Download a mail filter program (eg. Mailwasher)
- Create mail rules in Outlook [Express] to ban emails containing certain words in the mail (eg. "hot girls")
- Change your email address
where can I find out more information
An excellent guide to preventing SPAM can be found here: http://www.caube.org.au
