December 18, 2003

SPAM-less in San Jose
Reducing unsolicited e-mails

By Rick Dexter
Special to the Times

If you have had an e-mail address for more than a few months, you’ve probably already been exposed to the Internet plague called SPAM. If you’re just starting to explore cyberspace, SPAM is unsolicited and unwanted commercial e-mail, or junk e-mail. Once you start getting SPAM in your inbox, it gets real bad, real fast. Experts estimate that SPAM accounts for 50 percent to 70 percent of all e-mail traffic on the Internet. Because sending electronic mail is virtually free to the sender and allows them to remain unidentified, it’s a much bigger problem than postal junk mail.

Our federal government just passed a new anti-SPAM bill, and there has been much political hype about how it will eliminate this problem. I could go on for pages about this bill, but all I’ll say for now is: don’t expect much of a reduction in unwanted e-mail. The real solution to the SPAM problem has to occur on a technical level, but privacy issues and international laws get in the way.

Software programs and services are available to “filter” some of this unwanted garbage, but all of them have one inherent problem: they occasionally detect legitimate e-mail as SPAM and either delete it or bury it in a folder with so much other unwanted e-mail that you’ll never see it. This is called a “false positive.” I’ve seen false positives make million-dollar real estate deals fall through, create riffs between family members and cause people to miss funerals. My own SPAM filter quietly tucked away the reader question that prompted this article!

There are a few things you can do to help reduce unwanted e-mail before you are forced to install a SPAM filter:

1. Change e-mail addresses frequently and close down the old addresses so SPAM sent to them will not be delivered. Keep a distribution list of your contacts so you can easily inform them of your new address whenever you change it.

2. Use two or more e-mail addresses. Keep one private and only give it out to friends, family and business associates you know well. Use the other addresses for everything else, especially if you sign up for anything online. This makes it easier to change the public addresses frequently while keeping the private one for a long time. You can easily get free e-mail accounts at Yahoo or Hotmail. Do not post your private address on any type of Web site, online forum, instant message system or chat group.

3. Never click a link, including a “remove me” link, in an unsolicited email. Never reply to a SPAM e-mail. Don’t sign up with any services promising to remove your name from SPAM lists. All of these tactics can be used to collect and validate e-mail addresses, which can increase your SPAM tremendously.

4. Any time you create a new account at a Web site, first create a temporary, disposable e-mail address using a service like www.spamhole.com, and use this address when you sign up. When you feel sure that the site is not selling your e-mail address to others, you can change it later (to your public address, of course). Also, whenever you create a Web account, make sure you watch for a checkbox to allow you to “opt-out” of advertisement lists (the default is usually to “opt-in”).

5. Don’t ever order anything from an unsolicited e-mail, especially if you do it by clicking on a link that asks for any personal information. Clicking on any link in an e-mail, and sometimes even just opening it, allows a Web site to place tracking cookies on your computer or even install malicious software programs. Try not to open SPAM e-mails at all and disable your preview pane function so that they don’t automatically open. Also, don’t try to fight the problem by boycotting the companies in the advertisement, because some SPAM is sent by competitors hoping they will get this new business.

6. If you have a business with your own mail server, hire a professional to look at your configuration and give you some options to reduce your SPAM. The consumer-grade SPAM filter software programs may not work well in your environment, or there may be cheaper alternatives.

Using these tips can reduce your SPAM to the point where SPAM filter software may not be necessary. Until the technical and privacy issues with validating e-mail senders on the Internet are solved, SPAM is a problem that will likely be around for a while.

Rick Dexter is founder and CEO of NDYNAMICS Network Professionals. Rick has over 25 years of experience designing and supporting computer networks, particularly for small businesses and startups seeking reliable and scalable IT infrastructure. If you have a computer question that you would like to have answered in a future column, e-mail it to computerconnection@ndynamics.com.