I started using the Internet since 1997 [I did not have an internet account then, but used to access the net from cyber cafe]. Before long, I have a couple of ’free’ email IDs for myself and was overjoyed that I too had an online presence! Could communicate with my friends who were long distance. Could exchange articles etc too.
However, I soon realised that a lot of people on the net seem to know me. They started sending various offers or even claimed to have solutions to problems that I never had. But did I know them? NO and I did not want to be contacted by them too. However, I found no way of stopping them.
Very soon, my hotmail account started getting 50-60 junk email a day and it was becoming difficult to weed out really useful email. I was fed up of checking email too. Some friends advised me to keep on changing my email IDs and I soon had a dozen email IDs over a period of time. This was surely inconvenient for my contacts who found it difficult to keep a track of my ’most current email ID’. I may have also lost several genuine and important mails because of this.
Over these years, I was more experienced on the net and realised that changing email IDs is not the solution. There has to be a step further from that. Soon, free email services started providing blocking services and I could block certain email IDs from send mails to me. Certain subject lines could also be filtered. But soon, this too was not sufficient. Then came the age of email worms! This was disgusting. Open your email account and you have these nasty creatures waiting to create havoc at a click of your mouse.
By this time, I had my own internet connection and had started using an email client to manage my mails. It started getting more serious now, because I had important data on my PC and could not afford a virus attack through email. Also, downloading 50 email with a composition of 45 junk and 5 genuine was an expensive affair. This was criminal waste of bandwidth and my telephone bills started soaring up. This had to stop!
I soon found this software called MailWasher. It was a free product for personal use and could handle a single email ID for that version. I received most junk on my hotmail and so I deployed it on my hotmail account. I could not see a noticeable difference in the spam that I was receiving and thought that this is never going to stop now.
Let me explain shortly how this product is supposed to work. Once you decide to use Mailwasher, you do not download email directly into your mail client. You fire this software first and it downloads and inspects headers of your email first. It has a database of spammers which is matched against your email headers and the software automatically marks possible spam for deletion. Now here was an interesting concept! Spammers send you email because they have confirmed information that your email ID exists.
What if you are able to convince that your email ID does not exist at all? What if all their email bounce back to them? Mailwasher gave me this facility! I had an option of blacklisting individual email IDs as well as entire domains. I also had an option of white listing individual email IDs as well as entire domains. I started bouncing back email from spammers. Still, I could not see a noticeable decrease in the spam. HOWEVER, after around 3 months, I could see that the spam had reduced to almost 25%! What a relief. So this technique seemed to be working.
But I had more email IDs to be handled. After testing this proof-of-concept, I decided to upgrade to MailWasher Pro which cost me $ 30 to handle multiple email accounts. After 2-3 months more, I am in control! Yes, I am saving on bandwidth and the spammers are getting back their email as undelivered because my email IDs do not exist for them. In spite of this, I am aware that spam will never stop. New spammers arrive on the scene daily and they do harvest our email IDs. But the amount of spam is surely going down.
I also decided to get for myself a paid email account with entire domain and control in my hands. I chose a Linux based email service with Spam Assassin and this is excellent. It has in-built algorithms to identify spam. It envelops those messages, changes the subject line so that it is prefixed with a user-defined tag like [SPAM]. This is handled at the server level so it all happens before you see the mail in your inbox. Once tagged, MailWasher has a rule to mark such mails for deletion / bounding. I have a look and click a button to process all junk back to the spammers with thanks!
I am leading a much happier online life now and would be happy guiding users on spam reduction techniques on a case to case basis too!