Protect Yourself From Spam

How can I stop Spam email?

What is Spam?

• When is Spam Spam?

• Where does the term “Spam” come from?

• Why do people send Spam?

• How can I tell who the Spam is from?

• How do “spammers” get my address?

• If I “unsubscribe” won’t the Spam stop?

Links

How can I stop Spam email?
There are a number of things you can do to stop Spam email. Which ones suit you best will depend upon your needs, the type of email you generally receive, whether you have complete control over your email account, the number of legitimate correspondents you may have and how long you tend to keep them.

Scenario A.
Joe runs a small business. He regularly exchanges emails with about 50 business contacts. He also uses the Internet extensively to order goods or information, to book events and travel and to make new business contacts on newsgroups. Currently, over one half of his email is Spam. He can delete it fairly quickly, but it gets on his nerves.

The first thing Joe can do to get rid of Spam is change his email address and inform his regular colleagues. Next, he can get a second, web-based email address at no charge from one of the many providers of this type of service.

• How big of a problem is Spam?

• What are DNS blacklists?

• What is an open relay?

• How can I prevent Spam?

• How does an email Spam filter work?

• I want to send spam free bulk email. How can I be sure my recipients don’t think I’m sending Spam?

Scenario B.
Annette works in the customer service department of a large organization. Unlike Joe, Annette receives large numbers of legitimate emails from people with whom she has had no previous contact. It would not be feasible for Annette to change her email address and inform all of her correspondents. Furthermore, all of the email addresses in Annette’s organization have the same format: firstname.lastname@organization.tld. Annette receives over one hundred emails per day, of which typically sixty are Spam. Annette needs to talk to her email administrator to discuss the problem, which plagues many of her co-workers as well. The ideal long-term solution for Annette’s organization would be to install a server based anti Spam software with rules that can be modified for users and groups of users.

Email users in Annette’s service may have slightly different needs than users in human resources or in the legal department. In the meantime, Annette can probably lower her Spam workload substantially without filtering out legitimate customer email. By using the filters in her email client to examine the sender email addresses and subject fields of the Spam she receives, she can quickly identify keywords that will enable her to filter out most of the obnoxious Spam messages. This is not a good long-term solution, but will help her to cope until her email administrator implements something better. 

Scenario C.
Jean is head of IT in a middle school. She wants her students to use the Internet for research, become fluent in IT and be able to receive emails from legitimate sources. She already has a web content filtering system in place, but has no means to ensure that students do not receive inappropriate emails. Unlike Annette’s organization, which would rather let the odd Spam message get through than accidentally prevent legitimate customer emails from reaching their destination, Jean’s school cannot allow any inappropriate email to reach the students, even if this means blocking the odd legitimate message. Jean needs a server based solution that meets the following requirements: a) it must filter all email regardless of what email server it came from, b) it must quarantine suspect emails, allowing authorised personnel to flag individual mails as legitimate and c) it must have a variable threshold allowing the administrator to increase the level of severity in the event that marginal but bad emails actually reach their recipients.

Other sites of interest