Spam, which is just another word for ’’junk mail’’ or more formally, unsolicited e-mail, is one of the biggest curses of the Internet Age. Unsolicited e-mail exists in two forms - Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (UCE) and Unsolicited Bulk E-mail (UBE). Since e-mail is one of the easiest, fastest and cheapest modes of communication, it is very tempting for some companies to mistake UCE for penetrative and highly personal marketing and sometimes even proactive CRM. You and your dad often share the same postal address, but can you think of sharing the same email account - that explains the personal nature of e-mail. And there are those individuals who send mails to all the people in their address book. This comes under UBE. These mails range from jokes to anecdotes to solicitation for help. And the end result of all these are mailboxes cluttered with junk mail, time lost downloading the unwanted mails and wasted diskspace and bandwidth.
There are certain things I do to prevent spam. I took quite some time to put them down neatly and so I hope you’ll appreciate the not-so-little effort.
1. Have separate official and personal email accounts - If you are working and your employer provides you with an e-mail account, it always helps to have a separate external e-mail account for personal matters. For this purpose you can use the free web-based services like Yahoo or Lycos or take a fee-based account with Internet Service Providers like VSNL, Eth or the like. (Disclaimer: The mention of certain names/brands doesn’t mean that Mouthshut or the author recommend these products and/or service providers.) This helps to categorize your incoming email. Use the official account solely for official purposes. Earlier I used to get around 40-50 non-official mails (most of these coming under spam) in my official account everyday. Now after having a personal account (I chose Yahoo!) I have only 5-10 mails daily in my office account; and all of them are work-related. That keeps me concentrated at work during office hours. (Hope my boss reads this).
2. Use ’email blocking’ provided by your email software or email service - Most mail software and web-based services allow you to block mail based on the sender’s address. Use this effectively to prevent unwanted mails from reaching your mailbox.
3. Filtering based on to’, ’cc’ or ’bcc’ - Other than blocking, many e-mail programs and web-based accounts also allow you to filter mails based on criteria like sender’s address, ’to’ address, ’cc’ address, ’bcc’ address, subject, and body content into different folders. Use this feature to redirect mails that look like spam directly to the ’Trash’ or ’Deleted mail’ or into a specific folder for ’Junk’. Use the rules for filtering wisely to make it effective. If there are more than 10-15 addresses, the mail MAY be a good contender for spam.
4. Look for Unsubscribe instruction at the top/end of commercial mail - It is now an accepted convention and an expected ’privacy policy’ to allow the recipient to sign out of any e-mail list and to put ’unsubscribe’ information in every such mail. Use this get your address off unwanted lists. If there is no such information, reply to the sender asking them to take your name for their list.
5. Get your address off strangers’ address books - Send mails to individuals who keep you on their address book without knowing you personally. This happens mostly with a Friend Of A Friend (FOAF), who often does a reply all for some mail a common friend sent him and which had your address also among the recipients. Plainly ask the FOAF to remove your address off his list and ensure that you don’t get mails on things you are not bothered about. I have done this quite a few times and encouragingly all of them have respected my privacy.
6. Don’t give your e-mail address to every TDH site - Websites sell our address (they get it in millions) and make the same amount of money. Read the ’privacy policy’ of websites before you submit any vital personal information to ensure that you don’t end up in pain.
7. Scramble your e-mail addresses before posting them on your website - There are many tools which log into websites and read e-mail addresses of them. White pages, people directories are the usual targets. You can use online tools such as those found at https://upromote.com/emailscrambler.html or https://innerpeace.org/escrambler.shtml
And now a few links from my personal bookmarks:
- You’ve Got Spam: Tells you about spam, how it got the name and more.
URL: https://nolo.com/lawcenter/ency/article.cfm/objectID/A6F26AE8-C831-469E-81157FC4252D98CB2
- E-Mail Spamming countermeasures: Talks about detection and prevention of e-mail spamming. From US Department of Energy Guidelines.
URL: https://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/bulletins/i-005c.shtml -
- The Email Abuse FAQ at AOL.
URL: https://members.aol.com/emailfaq/emailfaq.html