Protect Yourself From Spam

Why do people send spam? /How can I tell who the spam is from?/How do spammers get my email address?/If I unsubscribe won’t it get rid of spam?

Why do people send spam?
Spam is the electronic equivalent of junk mail. People send Spam in order to sell products and services or to promote an email scam. Some Spam is purely ideological, sent by purveyors of thought. The bulk of Spam is intended, however, to draw traffic to web sites or to sell sex and money making schemes. Unlike junk mail in your physical mailbox, Spam does not abait if it is unsuccessful. When marketing departments send junk mail at considerable expense, without success, they generally cease, or try a different sales pitch. Spam on the other hand can be entirely unsuccessful, but the large number of wannabe spammers waiting in the wings ensures that we will continue to receive lots of it.

Spammers go to considerable effort to thwart recipients’ attempts to stop spam email. They specifically design their emails to bypass your email spam filter.

How can I tell who the spam is from?
Normally you cannot. Spam control can become very sophisticated.

More experienced users can look at the email “headers” to find the origin of the message but frequently the spammer will set up a one-time email account purely to initiate the spam email shot. When the email shot is finished, the account is closed.

At other times, the spammer will forge headers making it difficult or impossible to trace the origin of the Spam, so finding the original sender will very often prove fruitless. Spam protection and junk email prevention require more subtle measures than just finding the culprit.

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?

How do spammers get my email address?
Through many means. Some companies you may have had dealings with sell their mailing lists to third parties, spammers included. Spammers also use “robots” to scour the Internet and harvest any email addresses that they find. If you post to newsgroups you are also at risk of spammers picking up your email address and sending you junk email. To get adequate spam protection and get rid of Spam, you really need more than one email address. This is an essential element of proper Spam control.

If I unsubscribe won’t it get rid of spam?
If you didn’t have to subscribe to get it, there is little chance that unsubscribing will get rid of Spam. Professional spammers (something about those two words in the same phrase doesn’t seem right, but I digress…) use this trick to validate their email address list. They buy or steal lists sometimes containing millions of email addresses. Large percentages of these addresses may be invalid. By unsubscribing to the list, you are informing the spammer that your email address is a good one, and may be sold on to other spammers. Be prepared for more Spam, from many more sources. A better alternative would be to try blocking Spam, or to bounce Spam email using specialized email software.