Spamming, Yuk!

Unless your Internet Services Supplier (ISP) has some very good spam controls you are likely receiving 2 to 6 times more spam a day then you are receiving legitimate mail. Even when you have "Anti-spam" software watching over your Email account in many cases you still have to waste the time confirming that what the program thought was spam really is not an email from an old friend using a new email address or perhaps even a response to a request you made for some information from a website.

That of course is why you still need good anti-virus software running to examine the email before you open it.

How do so many spamers get your email address?. Well believe it or not, a ton of spam is sent out by using a program that randomly builds email addresses and sends them without even knowing if the addresses they used were real! There are several ways they can soon find out if it was a good address or not. Perhaps they monitor the messages many domains send back to email senders telling them it was invalid. The program simply goes into the list it kept of what addresses it sent and deletes the ones that were reported as invalid.

Another way is to hide a auto respond function in the email that notifies the program if an email it sent is opened. Then of course there is always the fact that the subject matter of sent email catches the receiver's eye and they respond to the email.

Another good way for spamers to get email addresses is to scan websites that have chat boards, question boards, game rooms, or any other place when a member might place his/her email address as part of opening up a private dialog with someone else visiting the same site.

For me I think that because I try to avoid most of the situations described above, the bulk of my spam comes from my website. For the last year or two I have made a concentrated effort to never post my actual email address on my website. That's because these tools called spiders or crawlers room around the WWW looking for sequences of letters and numbers that have the tell tale signs of being an email address on every page they find. Just about every email address has the front part that makes this email address unique on a domain, the "@" sign that tells the legitimate email address decoders that the domain part is coming next and then the "Period" that tells the decoder what type of domain this email lives on.

Even when the actual email address is hidden from view, these tools can look at the "source code" of the webpage.

So if I have been careful for a few years why do I still get hits. Well two reasons. First tools that collect addresses are like elephants. They never forget and the massive lists they generate can take a while to wrap around. Spamers need to cut back now and then to stay under the radar of  Federal and international laws that are finally coming into play. The second reason can very well be poor housekeeping on my part.

After you have a website for a while you might not pay close attention to pages that you abandon as part of changes you make to your active site. Remember that unless you have an operation large enough to warrant having a PC in house to support your web content, you rely on a web hosting service to provide you with storage space that is accessible to the WWW. In my case it might take me several hours if not a day or 2 to go through and check every webpage item on my site to see it it is actively in use.

For that reason I might be my own worst enemy when it comes to my battle with the world of spamers.

Snail mail is just silly jargon for the slow but always reliable non WWW method of getting mail

My last thought is that because Email spam is really nothing more than snail mail "junk mail" then I wonder what percentage of the mail that the pony express carried around the county was junk!

We know email can carry very damaging computer viruses and worms but then again there have been some pretty deadly stuff sent through the regular Snail  mail systems around the world.

In summary I doubt if we will ever be free of spam but we can take precautions that can reduce the amount we receive over time. My latest attempt to provide my email address to my web visitors, is to present it as an image. I know this a bit of a pain for my visitors but I do not believe that the automated web crawlers can extract text from images. As a note if you care to try this technique. Make sure you give the image an abstract name. These web collector tools are very clever. They already have your domain name as part of the URL (web address of your webpage) so all they need is something that might be the id portion of the email address.

Return to my Shareware WebSite

Thanks

Doug Clarke