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'the big R.D.' |
PAM (aka junk email) reduction for the masses ..
Spam is evil. Why? Regardless of the kind intentions, the
spammer is stealing money from our pockets in order to try to sell something to
us. But email is free, you say? Not even. Unlike receiving paper junk mail, we
pay good money to our ISPs to store and access the email sent to us. It takes
increasing amounts our valuable time to read, sort, and trash the junk so that
we can find and read our valid email. How did they get our email addresses? Most
often it was 'stolen', harvested without our knowledge or consent from other
sources on the web. How do they send out their massive volumes of email? By
taking advantage of shared internet resources that you and I pay for. Think of
it this way .. Would you be happy to accept long distance collect calls from
marketing salespersons? Would you buy a product or service from a merchant who
breaks into your home or office to plaster advertisements all over your wall.
Can you trust them? No.
So .. how can we keep all that junk email from appearing in our
inbox? I get requests for a quick and easy method of stopping the flow all the
time. Unfortunately, there just isn't a quick or easy solution out there .. yet.
The problem is, it takes effort to address the problem. The quick and easy
solution is still on my wish list.
There are, however, many thousands of pages giving varying
advice on ways and means of addressing the problem, many dating back to 1997 and
beyond. I categorize these pages into three main methods (not that I have read
them all .. nor do I attempt to summarize such ..):
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Track - Finding out where that email
is coming/came from.
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Block - Try to catch me, I'm the
Gingerbread Man!
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Complain - Who, and who not,
to whine to.
Tracking - Finding out where that email
is coming/came from.
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To manually determine email origins [for advanced users] try www.cl.ais.net/jchevron/spamtrack.html
where, Mr Afterburner describes methods for determining where email originates
through manual examination of email headers. Some of the links are out of date
.. e.g. the www.samspade.org page .. a
user friendly front-end for common tracing utility programs like Traceroute
or Whois. Interesting, but then what to do with the information? We
want to stop the spamming.
Blocking - Try to catch me, I'm the
Gingerbread Man!
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Spam Buster (freeware) www.contactplus.com/products/spam/spam.htm
Spam Buster directly accesses your POP3 email account at the server to identify
and (optionally) automatically delete spam email based on lists of known email
spammers and customizable include/exclude keywords. However, only works with
Windows and standard email accounts .. i.e. not on your Hotmail or other free
html based email accounts. Recommended.
Complaining - Who, and who not,
to whine to.
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Determining the actual email source can be tricky. Most spammers fake the
return address or are using the facilities of innocent third parties, so
don't even bother responding. Same for the removal email addresses - by
responding, you usually just get flagged as a live account on another list. How
can you find the responsible party when they are mostly irresponsible?
SpamCop (free) spamcop.net/anonsignup.shtml
to the rescue .. this free service automates the process of analyzing the junk
email and generating a public spam report to the appropriate network
administrators. SpamCop routes your complaint accurately and works with network
administrators and spammers to turn the tide. Note: Just what to do and how to
sign up is not completely obvious on this signup page .. (hint) enter your email
address in the blank and click on the 'Verify Email Address' button. The
resulting email sent to you provides free personalized links back to SpamCop for
reporting email spammers. You can save these custom email addresses to your
address book and just forward 'actual' spam to one of those email addresses or
put the SpamCop webpage link in your favorites/bookmark folder. You have to cut
and paste the email source into their form (see below),
but then it does all the hard work for you. Recommended.
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Short of changing your valid email address from time to time, akin to
getting an unlisted phone number, you will be forced to handle junk email. And
then, how will your friends and clients know where to contact you?
Blocking services are fine, but are not infallible and do not really address
the underlying problem nor do they deter the spammers in any way. Effectively
they just automate the manual deletion of email, and all the while, the volume
of junk email bouncing up against our inbox just keeps on snowballing. They
do, however, save us time by not having to read and delete each and every email.
Reporting spam abusers, although not immediately effective, will in the long
term work to discourage junk emailers. Their accounts will be identified to
their ISP providers .. who can issue warnings and who control access to the
internet. The oblivious spammer will be reformed. Hardcore junk emailers will be
temporarily deterred. The quicker we can target the accounts being used, the
more difficult it will be for them to get their spam out on the counter.
| How to cut and paste an email header ..
With Outlook Express, you right-click on the SPAM email line, select Properties,
Details, Message Source .. Right-click on the displayed
source text, select Select All, then right-click, Copy
to copy it to the clipboard. Switch to the SpamCop form page (as referenced
in the email you receive from them), right-click in the Process Spam
data entry box and select Paste to paste it into their form. |
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