Avoiding Spam
If you use your e-mail for anything at all, you probably get a lot of spam and junk mail that you’d like to be rid of. There is no way of accurately getting rid of all spam but no non-spam. Even if everyone’s definition of spam was the same, spammers themselves will always be trying new tricks to bypass your “spam filters”. But you can do a pretty good job of getting rid of the most egregious spam. (New e-mail programs, such as Apple’s Mac OS X “Mail” program, are extremely good at learning what is and isn’t spam.)
There are three basic ways to avoid spam: you can try to keep your e-mail address secret, you can tell your e-mail program to “filter” probable spam into a separate “spam” folder, or you can tell our server to tag probable spam for later filtering by you.
Keep Your E-mail Address Secret
Whenever you use your e-mail address publicly, you run the risk that your e-mail address will be harvested. If you put your e-mail address on a web page (any web page), it will almost certainly get harvested. If you post to a newsgroup, it will get harvested. If you post to a mailing list, it might get harvested. (On some mailing lists, it can be harvested if you merely join the mailing list, but this is becoming rare.)
You can simply use an invalid e-mail address (such as any address that does not contain an ‘@’ symbol) when sending messages to public places. Unfortunately, if you do this, most mailing lists won’t let you post (for good reason—your fake address isn’t subscribed), and nobody can reply to you.
You can create a special address for your public uses, such as a free e-mail site. Once it starts getting too much spam, you can disable the account and create a new one. Since you are only using this for discussion groups, you won’t need to tell all your friends about your new address.
On web pages where you need to take comments, you can use “CGI” scripts to take the comments instead of posting your e-mail address. See, for example, our own Email Form .
Spammer Scams
Spammers will try to trick you and your friends into giving them your e-mail address. Any web page that asks you for other people’s e-mail addresses is probably doing so for the purpose of sending unsolicited e-mail. For example, most (if not all) e-mail-based invitation web pages will save the addresses of everyone who has been invited, and then sell those addresses, or access to those addresses, for spamming. You’ll also see “you’ve got a crush” web pages that are doing the same thing. They are collecting addresses for later spamming.
So make sure you read the fine print before ever giving out someone else’s address, and make sure your friends do the same. If they use an e-invite service to send you an invitation, you will almost certainly start getting spam.
Spammers will also try to guess probable e-mail addresses. You can’t do anything about the initial guess, but you can make sure that they are unable to confirm their guess. What they do is put images or links into their spam, and if you view the image or click on the link, that will confirm that their guess was correct. (E-invite systems will do the same thing, to verify that the address that your friend gave them was your correct address.)
So you should never follow a link from a spam mailing. And you should turn off automatic viewing of images (or automatic running of scripts) in your e-mail software. If you want to view images in an e-mail, your mail software will let you do so on a message-by-message basis.
On-line contests will also often ask for your e-mail address for the purpose of sending you commercial e-mail. Some of these companies will sell your address, others will use it only internally (until they are bought out or go into bankruptcy, or change ownership), but if they ask for your e-mail address, they are almost certainly planning on using it.
Filter Spam with Eudora
I’m going to use Eudora as the example here, but any good e-mail program will have similar features with similar names. You can tell your e-mail program to send questionable mail to a special mail folder.
Dam the Spam
A lot of spam is not addressed to you. Spammers send out their spam to hundreds or thousands of individuals at a time. You can tell your e-mail program to “divert” any message that is not address to you. Divert it into a special spam folder, and, every once in a while, check this spam folder for legitimate mail.
In Eudora, pull down the “Window” menu and choose the “Filters” menu item. You should currently have no filters (if you do have some, you hopefully already understand them).
Your first filter will divert all mail that is not addressed to you, to a special “Spam” folder. Specify filtering when:
- “«Any Recipient»” “does not contain” “username”
- “or”
- “«Any Recipient»” “does not contain” “sandiego.edu”
- “Transfer To”
- “Spam”
This means that some listed recipient—some person this message was sent to—must be your username, and must include “sandiego.edu”. We do not use “does not contain username@sandiego.edu” because some people replying to you might end up with username@mail.sandiego.edu as the person they’re sending to.
ACUSD
There are legitimate reasons why a mail message to you might not be addressed to you. One is that it might be addressed to an older address of yours. For example, here at USD your address used to be either “username@acusd.edu” or “username@is.acusd.edu”. Those messages will also get put into your spam folder. You can also have your e-mail program filter those messages out before your spam filter diverts spam. You can then put them in a special “Old Address” folder, and warn those colleagues, at your leisure, that they need your new e-mail address.
- “«Any Recipient»” “contains” “username@acusd.edu”
- “ignore”
- “Transfer To”
- “Old Address”
After you make this filter, be sure to “drag” it up so that it is above your previous filter. This ensures that it takes precedence over that filter.
Mailing Lists
Another reason your address will not show up on a message that is sent to you is that it was sent to many people at once. If you are subscribed to a mailing list discussion, your address will generally not appear on messages from the list. And if a friend sends out an invitation to all their friends, they’ve probably made that list into a mailing list on their e-mail program, so your name may well not appear on that either. You might also be receiving some advertisements from businesses for which you want to receive the advertisements. They’ve put you on their mailing list, and you don’t want your spam filter to divert those messages.
Create an entry in your address book for each type of “mailing list” messages you’ll be receiving. For our example here, we’ll make a “Legitimate Spam” address book entry, a “Friends” address book entry, and a “Discussion Groups” address book entry.
Within each address book entry, list all of the e-mail addresses that send you that type of mail.
Once you have your address book entries set up, you can set up a filter that uses those entries.
Legitimate Spam:
- “From:”
- “intersects nickname”
- “Legitimate Spam”
- “ignore”
- “Transfer To”
- “Advertisements”
Friends:
- “From:”
- “intersects nickname”
- “Friends”
- “ignore”
- “Skip Rest”
Discussion Groups:
- “From:”
- “intersects nickname”
- “Discussion Groups”
- “ignore”
- “Transfer To”
- “Discussions”
Notice that one of those is different from the others: mail from your “Friends” is set to “Skip Rest”, which means “do nothing”. That mail will remain in your inbox where you can read it immediately. Mail from legitimate advertisers will go to your Advertisements folder, and mail from discussion groups will go to your Discussions folder.
Later, when you subscribe to a new mailing list, find new friends, and want more (or fewer) advertisements, you can edit the appropriate address book entry. The filter will use those changes automatically.
(You could also create an address book entry for senders you specifically want to ignore, and create a filter that diverts mail from those senders to your Spam folder or to another special folder, or directly to the trash.)
Be careful!
You need to be very careful when filtering messages: always pay attention to your filter folders for mail that you didn’t mean to filter. The filters give you the option of moving filtered mail directly to the trash; if you do this, you will never know if your filter is throwing out legitimate mail—until you get an angry phone call from a friend or colleague asking why you’ve been ignoring them.