How Can I Prevent Spam?

Email — we love to get personal email We need to get our
business email But, do we need to get all the junk emails, too?
Back in the early 1990’s, I remember checking my email one
morning and finding a really neat one — some creative computer
science student from Hawaii had sent me his résumé It took me a
little while to figure out what had happened This was my
first-ever piece of spam This kid had sent his résumé to
everyone who had posted a message to any of the Usenet
compsysibmpc newsgroups Even after I knew what he did, I
thought it was cool Not too long after that, though, was the
start of the most prolific Usenet spam — the “green card
lottery” spam
Fast forward to 2005: I now receive about 250-300 emails per
day, and it seems like 50% of them must be spam Our ISPs can
help, but, as users, we also have ways to control this
First, never open or “preview” the junk email (with Outlook and
Outlook Express, the “preview pane” actually opens the email in
an embedded Internet Explorer window, which is probably one of
the worst things you could do from a security point of view)
Second, never, ever, click on the link in the spam email if you
do open it Third, never, ever, ever buy the product advertised
through spam Spammers send millions of emails, hoping that even
a tiny percentage of recipients will buy through their
advertisement If people refuse to buy the products advertised
with spam, then the spammers will give up!
What else can you do? One control system you can use is a
program called Mailwasher With Mailwasher, you preview the
sender and subject of emails before you actually download the
emails from your ISP Then, you can delete the junk emails
before they are sent to you The power of Mailwasher, though, is
that you can cause Mailwasher to bounce the email back as if
your email address did not exist If you are lucky, your bounces
cause the bad guys to take you off their list
Outlook has its own “junk filter” system built in; however, I
have heard mixed reports on its effectiveness Some other email
programs also have built-in junk filters My choice is a free
email “classification program” called PopFile, that handles
spam/junk email as well as classifying any other type of email
you want to identify — such as “work,” “computer tips,” and
“hobby” PopFile works in conjunction with “rules” that you
create in Outlook Outlook Express, also known as “filters” in
other programs like Eudora, to segregate spam from the good
stuff
By default, PopFile will add “[spam]” to the beginning of the
subject line of a message that it thinks is spam Then, you can
use the rules/filters to say “if the subject contains [spam],
put this email in the junk folder” After training — you have
to train any anti-spam system to tell it what you think is
spam — PopFile on my computer has averaged 9945% accuracy
since I reset the statistics in May, 2004 — that’s on over
165,000 emails!
You can download PopFile at http://popfilesourceforgenet It
is free to use and free to share PopFile works with Outlook,
Outlook Express, Eudora, Thunderbird and other POP3 email
programs
Copyright (c) 2005 Terry A Stockdale

Tags | bounces, business, creative, internet, junk, lottery, percentage, point, result, science, security, spam, usenet, window