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Spam is destroying email.We all get spam emails every day. Sifting through these to find legitimate email messages is time consuming and extremely annoying. There is no real solution, but there are many things you can do to hide your real email address, filter spam and block known spammers. For example virtually all email from Asia and Russia is spam. The ongoing Nigerian scams are sufficient to block all email from Nigeria and maybe Africa.
HIDE YOUR REAL EMAIL ADDRESS:Ever wonder how
spammers find and email you all that "junk" They do so by using robots that
retrieve your email address from your webpages, and add it to their spammer's list.
If you have a web site, change your email address so that automatic email gathering software will not recognize it.
Here is a little trick to make the email addresses on your web pages harder to find by address-harvesting robots, aka spambots. Use @ instead of @ in your email links, e.g. "maitouser@yourname.com" instead of "mailtouser@host.domain". You could of course also use . instead of the dot and use character entities for the letters as well. This won't stop all the spammers, but it will stop some and that is worth the effort.
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Ever wonder how
spammers find and email you all that "junk" They do so by using robots that
retrieve your email address from your webpages, and add it to their spammer's list. Here's
a script to prevent spammers and email harvesters from finding your email address on your
website. The below email address link is unretrieveable by spammer robots. Simply update
the variables with your email information and relace your mailto: links with this script.
Example:
EMAIL FORWARDING
You could also get an email address from  bigfoot.com which you can give out to people. Bigfoot is one of several free services which will give you a free "phony" email address which will automatically forward email to your real address. Unfortunately spammers also use bigfoot and hotmail accounts and neither service seems able to stop it.
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The battle against spam is overwhelming. Your best hope is to try to filter or block out unwanted messages before you get them. However that could also mean blocking out wanted messages by accident. In addition, you can complain to the ISP (server) of the spammer if you can locate them. Information on how to do that is listed below.
MARGINALLY EFFECTIVE COMPLAINING
The only problem with complaining about spam to their ISP or service provider is that it only really works against the small time guy who is not a professional spammer. The sex and free money spammers and all those idiots peddling Norton software and similar professional spammers just move from service provider to service provider, so stopping them would require an UZI or a small yield nuclear device.
This site was actually hit by spammers who hacked into our system and used our service to send out millions of sex email spams. This is happening to legitimate web site operations fairly often. I will not tell you how to prevent this here, but if you need help, email me.
You need to determine the real source of the spam. This is almost never the return address or the "remove me" address shown in the spam. In fact responding to remove me addresses will not get you removed. It will do the exact opposite. By clicking on the remove me buttons or responding with remove me requests, you have just provided spammers with proof that your address is live and you will be putting yourself on hundreds of new spam lists. Never reply to spam or request a removal.
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The majority of abusive mail now has forged return address information, so the To:, From:, and Reply-To: addresses usually are not the actual source of
the message. You'll need to look at the first few Received: lines in the message headers to tell where the message actually came from.
Where are the headers?
Email programs will tell you how to see the headers if you look in their help file under headers.
Tracing the spammer from the headers in their spam
Here's how to trace an originating IP address to determine the ISP where the message came from. An IP will look like this
**Sample IP**
207.46.181.18
Send your complaint to the abuse department of this ISP (abuse@<insert ISP>) along with a full-unedited copy of the message. Be absolutely sure to include the header information. They need this to trace and verify the source of the spam.
Some Times It Is Useless to Complain: Be aware that some domain servers, especially Korean and Asian ones will do nothing to stop spam. All we can do with these bastards is try to filter their crap out of our mail boxes and delete everything that gets through. |
