Spam Control and Email Filtering

What is Spam?

Spam is unwanted bulk email, just like the junk mail you get in your mailbox at the Post Office. The main difference is that mass email is much easier and cheaper to send, thus there is much more junk email than junk postal mail.

How to Avoid Spam

The most effective way to avoid spam is to use our spam and virus filtering service, Postini. This service offers an extremely effective method of dealing with unwanted and potentially dangerous email messages before they reach your computer. For more information on this service, click here .

We have provided the following information for tips on alternative methods to handle spam should you decide not to activate our filtering service.

Browsing Habits:

1) Keeping your email address private: Any time your email address is entered into a web page, there is the potential that it could be accessed by people who send Spam or by those who sell lists of email addresses to spammers. This can happen when you sign up for online services, make online purchases, or register products online. Before giving out your personal email address, always review the company's Privacy Policy to be sure they won't sell or give away your email address or other personally identifying information.

2) Using second address for non-personal email: One solution is to obtain and use a second email address that can be considered "disposable." This works well when dealing with any business whose Privacy Policy you may be unsure of. We offer extra email accounts for $5 per month. Many websites such as; Yahoo, Hotmail and Lycos offer free email accounts to anyone who wants to sign up. Because these email accounts are free and are easy to create, it's not too difficult to set up a new account if the one you are using starts getting flooded with junk mail.

Email Habits:

Mailing lists: When subscribing to any sort of email listing, be sure to review their privacy policy before signing up. Because legitimate mass emailing may contain hundreds of addresses, most of which will be active, these are often a gold mine for spammers who want to harvest addresses in order to send junk mail. When subscribing to this sort of list, you'll want to see if they are willing to put your address in the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) field when sending. This is a good idea when receiving any sort of mass emailing (even from friends) because it keeps your address from being read by anyone who might later receive the mass email.

Handling Spam Messages

What to do when you get spam:

1) When you find unwanted messages in your inbox, the easiest (and arguably the best) thing to do is simply delete them. This usually doesn’t take much time, especially if you are familiar and comfortable with your email program. We strongly advise against any sort of response to spam messages. When you reply or ‘unsubscribe’ to a spam message, one of two things often happens; either you don’t get anywhere. (i.e. it’s a dead link or a non-existent email address that you are replying to), or the person who gets your request is the spammer and then they know that your address is active and that messages are being read, which makes your email address more valuable and therefore more of a target. This will open the floodgates, since most often they will then add your address to their ‘hot list’ which they then sell to, or trade with other spammers.

2) For proactive measures against spam and spammers, there are a number of online resources. You can go to www.spam.abuse.net for a great deal of information about spam and what can be done about it, including current legislation regarding email practices. If you go to www.spamcop.net you will find more information as well as an automated tool for reporting spam activity to the proper administrators. These tools are sometimes hard to use as well as time consuming, so again, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Filtering Spam

One method of dealing with spam that works very well (with up to 99% efficiency, if the strictest rules are used) is filtering. Filtering is the process of running a set of rules (or logic) on each message, usually as you download it from the server. You design rules based on characteristics of an email message. For example, a rule might be set up to put messages from a certain person into a certain folder (Put messages from ‘John Smith’ into folder ‘John’). Another type of filter (about the most restrictive) might say, If message is not from a known friend of mine (as defined by my Address Book) then delete. This filter would delete any messages from new contacts, if you do not first add them to your address book, or if a friend changes email addresses without contacting you prior to doing so. Also, a filter this restrictive would likely not be a good choice for any type of business email, because new ‘customers’ would be unable to reach you. Each person has to come up with their own filters to meet their individual needs.

We encourage you to try setting up filters if you are getting spam, but we must note that Humboldt Internet does not provide technical support on filtering. If you choose to use filtering please understand that it is not foolproof, and, in the extreme, if not setup properly, could cause more problems than it solves. If you run into problems while setting up or using filters, you should either refer to the ‘help’ within your email program, or contact the manufacturer of your email program for technical support.

Only some email programs support filtering, and these are generally newer versions of the email programs. Also, the newest versions of each email program generally have better filtering options; therefore you can usually build more efficient filters when using the newest program. The email programs that we know have a filtering option are below:

** Written by Humboldt Internet

For all others, clicking on the link(s) above will search www.google.com for tutorials specific to each email program, that are not yet available from Humboldt Internet.

Tutorials written by Humboldt Internet on filtering in most of the above email programs will be completed and become available in the near future.

To summarize:

First, be very cautious about putting your email address anywhere where it could be publicly accessible.

Second, use a secondary email address (usually through a free service) for those times when you need to give out an email to anybody/ any website that you are not sure has a strict privacy policy.

Third, in most cases (utilizing www.spamcop.net would be one of the only exceptions), ignore all unsolicited messages, either by just deleting them, or by filtering them.

Finally, once it starts, the only surefire way to stop spam (as opposed to filtering it) is to change your email address.