One of our advertisers recently had to change his e-mail address when the spam-count soared to well over 3000 a day. The net is bogged down by spam, estimated to comprise 80% of traffic. This is the junk mail of our time. 

Spam is promising stuff. It shows you how to become a minister of the church (with all the tax advantages), obtain university degrees you never studied for, become a lover with the firmest of physical assets and have any drug delivered to your door without a prescription. You can even receive 26 million dollars if you send your banking details to a disinherited Nigerian widow. Yeah sure.

The word spam was culled from a Monty Python sketch, “Spam beautiful Spam!” but the correct acronym is UBE — Unsolicited Bulk E-mail — and it’s big business. Spammers use special software to harvest the web for valid e-mail addresses on websites, mailing lists, newsgroups and discussion forums. Some spammers manage to look right into the address book (Outlook Express is a prime target) on your hard drive and then spoof identities so that UBEs appear to come from someone you know. While anti-spamming legislation is being introduced in some countries it’s up to you to protect yourself as best you can.

Prevention better than cure: The first step in protecting yourself from spam is to make it difficult to harvest your business e-mail address. Use it only for business relations you feel safe with. Use a free address for everything else, especially for signing on to newsgroups and anywhere open to the public. Yahoo, Caramail and others will provide a free address with a click of the mouse. Use it for all insecure messaging. When the spam starts arriving, you can then just switch to a new free address.

Businesses are the most prolific users of the Internet, often with high-profile websites. There is no perfect solution: once a domain name is known to spammer software it will take over and try sending to every possible version of the name: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , sales@, joe@ and so on. Encrypting e-mail addresses on websites or using a simple Javascript to avoid inserting a telltale “mailto:” anchor right on your website can fool many harvesters.

After the fact: Never answer spam, not even to tell the spammer to stop. Your response will only confirm an active address and the spam will get even worse. Never visit questionable websites, especially racy ones. While you’re admiring the ladies the site could be probing your address book for valid e-mail addresses. Install a hardware or software firewall. Your computer shop can sell you what you need.

Most service providers can set up a spam filter for you. This won’t stop the spam from coming but it will label it so you can easily delete it. Webstore in Nice have installed one for us which manages to identify well over 90% of the UBEs we’re sent.

Spamming operations send out over 100,000 spams an hour — all done by computers which obey rules set down by the spammer. If your programming skills are up to it, poisoning spammers is a satisfying endeavour: infest the spammer with bogus e-mails that start a loop so that he spams himself instead. You can find a list of links that should help you deal with spam at www.riviera-reporter.com/stopspam. 

From Reporter 105 - Oct/Nov 2004

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