You may be wondering just who’s sending all these spam messages. Some spammers are just small-time “entrepreneurs” who’ve received bad advice about how to promote their businesses. However, the majority are immoral people who are exploiting and destroying one of the greatest communication tools ever invented. Humorist Dave Barry of the Miami Herald calls spammers, “The mutant spawn of a bizarre reproductive act involving a telemarketer, Larry Flynt, a tapeworm, and an executive of the Third Class mail industry.” Here are five smart things you can do to shield yourself from the continuing onslaught of spam:

Strategy #1: Protect your work email address
If you’ve been assigned a work email address like “[email protected]” it belongs on your business card, but very few other places. Since that corporate email address usually follows some standard format based on your name ([email protected], [email protected], etc.) you’re going to have a hard time changing it later on to escape from spam. Never use your work email address in “public” on the web – in an online discussion forum, on a “registration” form, etc. There are automated harvesting programs (“bots”) that scour the web sucking up random email addresses and adding them to spam lists. For this reason, if your work email address is listed on your company web site, talk to your web administrator to have it “coded” so it’s readable/clickable by a human being but not by a scourbot. Any competent webmaster should be able to do this easily for you.

Strategy #2: Have more than one email address
Even if spam didn’t exist, it would still make very good sense to have – at a minimum – a separate personal email address for yourself. You can still get free web-based email accounts you can access anywhere from Yahoo, Mail.com, Hotmail (the original, now owned by Microsoft), and others. They’re just making the free accounts somewhat less user-friendly to motivate you to “upgrade” to their paid accounts. Remember that the work email account provided to you by your employer belongs to that employer – and your company has the full legal right to not only read your email messages but also take action against you based on what they see. But I digress… One very good spam-related reason for using multiple email addresses is to have “throw-aways.” Keep at least your work email and one personal email address very clean (by limiting its distribution to your “inner circle”) and use others for buying things online, “registering” for web services and publications, and for posting to online forums.

Strategy #3: Use an email forwarding service
Even better than having multiple personal email accounts is using a free “mail forwarding” service. There are about half a dozen free-of-charge forwarding services available, but I like the one called Spam Motel (spam checks in… it doesn’t check out). Here’s how it works (text from the Spam Motel documentation): Whenever you are online and about to give out your e-mail address – STOP! Do you really want to do this?  Spam Motel has a better way. Simply type a short reminder memo to yourself, including why and to whom the e-mail address is being given. Spam Motel records this memo, and the date and time, and quickly sends you a special "disposable" address to use instead of your real one. The new address is automatically placed into the "clipboard" memory of Windows, where it can be pasted into any online form that you are filling out. E-mails sent to this special address are forwarded to your regular e-mail account, along with your reminder memo, which appears at the top of the e-mail message. From now on, you'll know exactly when and where the sender or spammer got your e-mail address. But just knowing this information is not enough. So we give you the power to stop spam sent to any of these special addresses. This is done through the Log Page – your online control and information page – where you can delete any of the addresses you've given out. You can also suspend and resume forwarding for each address at any time. Your real e-mail address is never given out, just the special ones you create using Spam Motel. Other forwarding services similar to Spam Motel are Spamex, Sneakemail, and Despammed. Take your pick. They’re all good.

Strategy #4: Use an “odd” email address
If you make up a new email address with some non-alpha characters like “xyz#[email protected]” you’ll get less random spam. That’s because of a new insidious spammer tactic called “dictionary spamming.” Since it costs next to nothing for these lowlifes to blitz out tens of millions of messages overnight, they just make up addresses with the hope that one in a thousand will be “real” and get through. They’ll often try first name initials plus last names (e.g. [email protected]). They’ll also mix-n-match different popular domains (a domain is the part of your email address after the “@”). If you had an old account like “[email protected]” but cancelled it because it was overrun by unsolicited email (AOL users especially get a lot of spam), and opened a new account at Earthlink: “[email protected]” you’ll probably get spammed even if you never give out that new address. It therefore makes sense to start completely fresh as “[email protected]” – you’re going to have to notify everybody about your new email address anyway.

Strategy #5: Use spam filters
Many Internet service providers (ISP’s) offer different levels of filtering for your inbound email. (The best use a service called “Brightmail.) However, don’t expect miracles. At their more liberal settings, most spam will still leak through. At their tightest, most of your legitimate emails will get caught, mixed in with the spam, and possibly lost. You sure don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater – so experiment a little and see which middle setting works best for you. For many people, an alternative approach that works well is to autosort incoming email into different inbox folders based on a “whitelist” (a list of friendly email senders whom you wish to continue communicating with). Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, and most other email programs make this easy to do. A whitelist approach is also better than a personal blacklist. It rarely pays to add people to a “junk senders list.” The “from” address in most spam emails is forged so you’ll rarely get spam from the same “sender” twice.

Fight back!
It might seem futile, but you can take action against spammers. There’s a brand new spam-fighting service called SpamNet that’s almost ready for prime time (it’s in a final beta version for Outlook now but still very usable). SpamNet is based on “peer-to-peer” technology (like Napster). When you get a spam message, you highlight it and click a button. The message is instantly analyzed and added to the SpamNet database. Meanwhile, all your incoming messages are scanned to see if they match the profile of spam caught by somebody else on the SpamNet peer-to-peer network. If it matches, it’s filtered out and placed in a spam folder in your inbox. When enough people start using this service, it’s going to be a very effective weapon in the war against spam. Millions of strangers cooperating anonymously to eliminate spam from their lives. Got to love that concept.

Finally… never, never, never buy anything from a spam message, no matter how attractive it seems. These tapeworm spammers work on very small numbers – if only one person out of several thousand responds, they consider it a big success – so you’re actually doing a lot of damage to others if you buy something (plus you’re probably going to get ripped off). Don’t even click on any links in the spam – especially not on the “remove me from your list” link or button. All that does is confirm that your email address is connected to a live human being, ensuring that you’ll be spammed even more in the future.

I’ll have more information in upcoming issues of The Urbach Letter about spam’s evil cousins: spyware, malware, viruses, and malicious web sites. It’s getting nasty out there... and I’ll do my best to protect you from the really bad stuff.

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