Spam Free

Faith's computer hard drive has been acting up so I've been spending time on the machine setting up backups and helping to recover from corrupted files. Last night, as I was setting up a weblog for her, I noticed that when she checked email there was a bunch of spam.

I've trimmed my email spam down to hardly anything at all and thought that my techniques might be useful to others. Unfortunately this won't help you get rid of spam on an existing account, but it can help you to keep the next email account clean.

Avoiding spam in the first place:

Get a free email account (or two!), we'll call this your pMail.
(Zeke checks his pMail each time we go for a walk)
Never, under ANY circumstances, use your real email account for online activity.
Use your pMail:
- for contacts you don't know very well
- for contests
- for online shopping
- for posting ads, ebay, lonely hearts club, etc...
- for newsgroups and message boards
- for your own website/log (unless you have form mail...more later)
- for friends/relatives who ALWAYS get viruses
- when in doubt give out the pMail address...
  (you can always give out your real email later, once you know/trust someone)
Have one pMail for completely untrusted (mostly garbage) and one for questionable sources, makes things easier to filter
Check pMail once a week, maybe more often if you are expecting something

What to do when you get spam:

Never, ever, ever, reply. There's isn't a human on the other end, even if it is a person.
Don't view it! HTML email has embedded graphics which, when viewed, can signal the spam sender that the email account is valid...resulting in more spam!
(Apple Mail turn off display images and embedded objects(html). Other apps turn off preview. Or, select a non-spam message and then shift click the spam emails to create a group for deletion)
If your mail program has the feature (Apple Mail) mark it as spam (or rather, mark a group of them so you don't have to view it)

The ultimate weapon:

Get your own domain (i.e. jerryrig.com). This also means you can make up any email account you like. For example, when you deal with a website often you can make an email account just for that website. If you start getting spam from that address, well, maybe they sold your name? Either way, you can then easily change the email address and toss those emails into the garbage automatically. Dont' give up your pMail though, it's still a great first level filter.

If you have your own domain and a website, don't post your email address, instead put up a form which allows folks to email you. There's a bunch of scripts for doing this (although the old formmail.cgi/pl seems to have a hole) and it lets people contact you without putting your email on the web page.

Spammers use spiders. Spiders are programs that go out and look at all of pages they can find on the web and pluck off any email address they encounter. They spider weblogs, websites, newsgroups, you name it. I posted a brand new email address on a few of my web pages for less than two weeks, yet it was long enough to be spidered and spread to every spammer out there.

info