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Fighting Spam
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| Monday, January 5, 2009 |
What is Spam? According to Scott McAdams, OMA Public Affairs and Communications Ministry (www.oma.org):
"Studies show unsolicited or junk e-mail known as spam, for about half of all e-mail received. Although once regarded as little more than a nuisance, the prevalence of spam has increased to the point where many users began to express a general lack of confidence in the effectiveness of e-mail transmissions, and concern about the spread of computer viruses via unsolicited messages. "
In 2003, President Bush signed the Can Spam "bill, in December 2003, the first national standards around bulk unsolicited commercial e-mail. The bill, approved by the Senate by a vote 97 to 0, prohibits senders of unsolicited commercial e-mail, use false return addresses to conceal their identity (spoofing) and the use of dictionaries to generate such shipments. In addition, it prohibits the use misleading subject lines and requires that the e-mail and opt-out. The law also prohibits harvesting addresses of senders of websites. Violations are a misdemeanor crime subject to a year in prison.
A major issue to be discussed about this: spam is now coming from other countries in greater numbers. These messages are more difficult to combat because they come from outside our country, laws and regulations. Because the Internet opens borders and thinks globally, these laws are fine and good, but do not stop the problem.
So what do you do about this? It is the top 5 of the Rules to do to protect themselves against spam.
Number 1: Do what you can to avoid having your e-mail on the net.
There are products called "spam bots" that search the Internet for email addresses to send an e-mail. If you are interested, do a search on "spam spider" and you'll be amazed what you get. Interestingly, there is a site WebPoison.org, an open source project to fight against Internet "spambots" and "spam bots" by giving false HTML Web pages, which contains false e-mail
Some suggestions for you: a) use the e-mails, which can also hide the addresses or b) the use of addresses as sales@company.com instead of your full address to help fight against the problem. c) There are also programs that encode your e-mails, as jsGuard, which encodes your email address on web pages so that spiders, any spam to find it difficult or impossible to read your e -mail.
Number 2: the software blocking spam. There are many programs here for that. (go to www.cloudmark.com or www.mailwasher.net for example). May you also buy a professional version. Whatever you do, get the software. It will save you time. The software is not infallible, but they really help. You usually have to do manual set up to block certain types of e-mail.
Number 3: Using the multiple approach e-mail.
There are many free e-mail address to have. If you must subscribe to newsletters, then a back-up e-mail. It would be like giving your phone number to sell your best friends and business number to everyone.
Number 4: Attachments from people you do not know the Bad, Bad, Bad.
A problem with spam is that they have attachments and attachments may have viruses. Corporations often have filters that do not allow such things happen to you. E-mail address is much more "open" spamers. General rule: if you do not know who sends you something, do not open the attachment. Secondly, the search services that offer filtering. Firewall vendors offer this type of service.
Number 5: Email services now have "bulk-mail" baskets. If what you are currently using does not support it, consider moving to a new vendor. The concept is simple. If you know someone, they can send emails. If you do not know them, put them in the stack of mail in bulk and "choose" to allow them in your circle. Blocking spam software has this concept as well, but seems to have additional layers of criticism these days, it is worth looking. |
posted by neptunus @ 5:57 PM
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