How do I get rid of all this spam?!?!

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Summary: Spam is getting worse, there's no question. What can you do about it? There's no magic answer, but there are various thing you can do to help.

If it seems like it's been getting worse lately that's only because it has. The amount of spam has only been increasing, and latest attempts to legislate a solution appear to have had little if any impact.

So what's a poor user to do?

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The unfortunate bottom line is that there is no magic answer and no silver bullet. There is no solution today that will guarantee you get only the email you want while also guaranteeing you get all the email you want. There are many partial solutions that have varying degrees of success, depending on your needs and your willingness to accept some of the restrictions or some additional steps.

Email filters work by analyzing your email's contents prior to your seeing it and then flag or delete the email that it thinks is spam. You can probably guess the problem with most filters - sometimes they guess wrong. It's typically to continue to receive a reduced number of spam emails even with filtering in place. What's worse is that filters will occasionally mark as spam email that you truly wanted. In a business situation this is simply unacceptable. The good news is that most spam filters are "tunable" - meaning that you can adjust how aggressively they filter spam.

I don't have any formal recommendations for spam filters. Not because there aren't good ones out there, but because they are very specific to either your email server or ISP or to your email client. I will note that many of the more popular filters are based on SpamAssasin technology. Also, my wife and I have recently been having very good results with Microsoft Outlook 2003's junk mail filter.

If you can't use a filter, what then? The most common solution is to have multiple email addresses. One approach is to select one to be your "private" guarded email address - much like an unlisted phone number - that you never use in situations where the email address would be harvested for spam mailing lists. The other approach is to generate "throw-away" email addresses that you use only for a limited time (say when registering a product), and can safely ignore thereafter. And of course both approaches can be used at the same time.

A recent entry into the fight against spam is something called challenge/response. It's available as a service from various companies and is now also sometimes offered or required by some ISPs. Challenge/response as its name implies is a challenge sent in response to email from an unknown source to prove that the sender is human. If the respond and confirm that they are, a) they are remembered and never have to see a challenge again, and b) the mail they sent you is delivered. If they do not respond then you never see the email.

The problem with challenge response relates to any mailing list you might sign up for, any on-line purchase that might result in sending you an email confirmation, or any legitimate organization that might send you valid yet automated email. This is email you want. Yet senders to such lists do not have the time or the resources to respond to a challenge for each of their recipients. Typically they'll simply ignore all challenges. The result: unless you remember to proactively white-list them beforehand then you won't get the email you request.

Related Links:

• Ask Leo! - Where are these viruses coming from?

• Ask Leo! - Why is my mail to this person not getting through?

• Ask Leo! - I keep getting bounce emails for addresses on my domain that don't exist. How can I stop this?

• Ask Leo! - Why am I not getting the email I signed up for?

• Ask Leo! - Someone's sending from my email address! How do I stop them?!

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• The Spam Primer - an excellent discussion of SPAM, how it happens, and some of the steps you can take.
• Industry Sites - The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email, The Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy, and The SpamCon Foundation. With a problem as large as spam has become, there's naturally been a flood of groups and organizations to fight the problem. If you're interested at all at what's going on in the industry to combat spam, or if you're in a position to help the fight, check out those sites for additional resources.
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• Anti-SPAM software in the Ask Leo! Store

Article 138 | Posted January 11, 2004