Preventing SPAM (2)

More tips and tricks to help keep Unsolicited Bulk Email (Spam) at a minimum

If you’ve already read the five top tips on how to stop Spam from getting to you – or at least reduce the quantity – you may want to take things a little further – you’re probably still getting Spam from some sources, and may want to stop that as well.

Well, sad to say, if your email address is already on Spammers’ lists, that address is doomed to keep on getting Spam. The only way you can sort it out is kill the address for a while – maybe as much as a year. With an AOL address, that’s easy to do – you simply delete the screen name from your account (go to keyword Screen Names in order to do this).

That doesn’t however, address the problem if the screen name in question is the Master account – the first screen name you had. You can’t delete that one. If that’s an address that has become a Spam target, then you may need to treat it as exactly that – an account you know is going to be Spammed to death, and one you visit only infrequently in order to delete all email unread.

If that’s the case, you’ll need to create what I’ll call a “Private” screen name on your account. This screen name is for one purpose only – and that is to receive email. It should be used for no other purpose at all.

The New Screen Name

For this new screen name, follow these rules:

Do’s:

• Give your new email address only to selected people you know you want email from. Do this on a one-to-one basis. It’s for family, friends and selected businesses only. I call it the “secret” list of contacts.

• Treat it, more or less, as a secret

Don’ts

• Never, ever, sign up to an email list with it

• Never, ever, use this new address if you’re prompted for an email address to gain access to anything on the Web

• Never, ever, use this new address on any Web site you may create

• Do not create an AOL profile for this address

• Do not use this screen name in Chatrooms

• Do not use this address on message boards or in Usenet postings

• Do not use this screen name for Instant Messaging other than with people on your “secret” list

• Do not, ever, use the same name (the bit that would be before the “@aol.com” in an email address) for any other service.

• Do not let anyone else give this address out on your behalf.

• Never publish it anywhere – give it out only on a one-to-one basis.

If you follow that list of rules, you will almost certainly remain Spam-free on that screen name. Admittedly, the rules seem somewhat draconian, but they are the only effective way of making as sure that you can be that an email address gets no Spam.

Old Screen Names that are Spam Magnets

What if you’ve got a non-master screen name that’s a Spam target? Just delete it – get rid of it. Email anyone that would be on your “secret” list with your new screen name before you do delete it, just to let them know how to get in touch, but get rid of it sooner rather than later. Spammers would get myriads of bounced emails if everyone on AOL did this – and they’d pretty soon cleanse their databases of the dead addresses – at least the ones that don’t forge headers and use open relays to send their execrable missives would.

You probably shouldn’t re-use on old Spam-magnet screen name within, say, two years. Even then, it may re-surface on Spammers’ lists. If you do decide to re-use an old screen name (assuming that AOL will allow it, which it probably shouldn’t), don’t try to use it as a spam-free screen name for the “secret” list – it probably won’t work.

Spammer Knobbling

While I’ve been researching this article, I’ve come across a great many Web sites advising people to “knobble” Spammers’ robots by including a link to a page of nonsense email addresses on their home pages. These exist so that harvesting robots will trawl them and harvest thousands or addresses that don’t, couldn’t ever exist. I’ve given this a lot of thought, and have decided to advise you against doing that. Here’s why:

Aside from Spam being a nuisance, and costing many people money to download, the millions and millions of Spam emails constantly hurtling through the Internet actually take up bandwidth. If you consider that the route from one server to another on the Internet can only take so much traffic, every Spam that travels that route slows down your Internet speed.

If you’ve ever logged on to AOL (or any other service) at 6:30pm, you’ll know that Web sites that loaded like lightning at two in the morning display on your PC with all the speed of a disabled slug on mogadon. That’s because of the sheer numbers of folks in the UK that are surfing the web when they get home from school/work/the shops. It’s just like traffic jams on the roads when folks are going to work, or coming home.

Anything that adds to that traffic can only make things worse. So, while it’s a lovely thought that using one of these misdirection pages to fill Spammers’ lists with addresses that are never going to be of any use, and thus thwart their nefarious plans, it’s actually not going to make things any better for us as users.

In fact, it can make things worse. One piece of Spamming software that I’m aware of takes a random email address from the list and inserts that as the Reply-to: address. Any Spam that bounces off the list bounces back to that address!

Consider what will happen if it’s your email address that happens to be the unlucky one! Either way, every “impossible” email address on a Spammer’s list generates not one but two emails, doubling the problem. So, my best advice is, don’t do it, no matter how tempting.

Read part one

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David Dorn