Control Spam: Tips & Tricks

You have your page on the Net. You have it promoted with the search engines, you've placed your ads, and you sit back and wait for the orders to come in. But, the e-mails all start - "Make $50,000 in your underwear." What happened! Find out why it's not just a lunch meat anymore.

1. What is s.pam? This is a subject of much discussion. Some people have some strange definitions. But, we say this: if you receive an e-mail that you did not ask for - it's probably s.pam. Here's some examples of what we consider s.pam & what we don't:
   • You post something in a newsgroup & request people respond to you via e-mail. When they send you their response - that IS NOT s.pam.

     Someone comes along and collects e-mail address from the newsgroup. Then they e-mail something to you (and maybe a few 1,000,000 others) that has nothing to do with what you have requested. That IS s.pam.

   • You send a request to someone to send you information in an e-mail. They send you this information, and maybe a follow-up or two. This IS NOT s.pam.

     These same people continue to send you information months after your request. More often than not, this information starts to have nothing to do with your original request. This IS s.pam.

   • You place a classified ad, free-for-all link, or something similar on a site that offers them. You get an e-mail from them confirming that your entry was received. Maybe at a later date, they send another e-mail to tell you the entry has expired. This IS NOT s.pam.

     The people offering the classified ads, .... , take your e-mail address and add it to their mailing list. You receive mailings from them other than confirmations. This IS s.pam.

   • You begin receiving e-mails from someone or some organization you may or may not have heard of before. Doesn't matter if it's from "John Doe" offering you a chance to make $50,000 in your underwear. Or, if it's from Microsoft® with information about Windows 2045beta (no, it's not out yet). If the e-mail is commercial in nature & trying to sell you something & you did not ask for it, this IS s.pam.

     And to paraphrase Groucho Marx, "What $50,000 was doing in my underwear, I'll never know!"

   By now you get the idea. There are more examples we could give, but it should not be necessary. s.pam is nothing more than electronic "junk mail." The big difference with e-mail is this: you are paying some ISP for e-mail service. With real mail, the person sending the mail pays for it. With e-mail, the person receiving the mail is also paying to receive it.

2. How can I keep from getting s.pam? You really can't, but you can keep it somewhat minimized by limiting how you use you email address. Here's some suggestions.
   • Only use one email address. Some of us have accounts with multiple ISP's. Some of us are with AOL, or some other service that allows multiple identities. Some of us have our own domain, and can use unlimited email addresses (anything@your.domain.com). But, the convenience of different addresses means the s.pammers will eventually get them all. Then, you get multiple copies of the same s.pam.

     On our first domain (dentex.com), we used different addresses for everything. sales@, support@, newsletter@, ...., webmaster@. So every make-money-fast scheme came to each address. After about a year we were receiving close to 300 junk e-mails every day. (And, this was 1995.) It was nearly impossible to find the real mail among the s.pam. So, we let our domain go, and got a new one (den-tex.com). Some company in Canada now has our original name - and probably our s.pam.

     So, no matter how tempting, only use one address. Instead of using sales & support & webmaster@your.domain.com - just use webmaster@your.domain.com. Then, ask the person sending you the mail to put sales/support/webmaster or whatever in the subject line. You will still get s.pam, but only one copy of it.

     One thing you will want to do is - get a free email account at Hotmail, Yahoo, or some other source. When you submit your website to FFA pages use this address. This way all those "confirmations", and the s.pam that follows, doesn't end up in your real email.

3. What can I do about it? Unfortunately, once you start getting it, you are going to keep getting it. But, some things can help get you off of some mailing lists.
   • When you receive any unsolicited commercial e-mail, forward a copy to the web host. If the mail comes from BigBucks@my.domain.com, then forward the message to abuse@my.domain.com. Most service providers have a dim view of s.pam. It ties up their servers, so it is usually a violation of their "terms of service". After most s.pammers get their accounts taken away by several service providers - they get the message and quit s.pamming.

   • A lot of s.pam comes from MLMers. You have all received the same e-mails. "Just in pre-launch, this will explode." Well, most of these companies have a clause in their "contracts" that prohibit the use of bulk e-mails. It may take some trouble on your part to find out who is really in charge of the company. But, when you do - forward the s.pam to that person. If the s.pammer gets kicked out of the company for it, they may think twice before doing it again.

   • Most s.pam comes from people who buy CD's with millions of e-mail addresses. Or from people who have bought e-mail "harvesting" programs. Either way, the addresses come from scanning the Net, and harvesting e-mail addresses from web pages & from the newsgroups. So, give them what they ask for.

     We have a page That has 100,000 bogus email addresses on it. The page takes up almost 2MB, but we have the server space for it. There is an almost invisible link to this page on our home page. You would never follow the link, but the "harvesters" will. We change the addresses every month or two. By now, we have probably put 5,000,000 bad addresses on the Net. You can do this too, if you have the space on your server. There's a few good cgi scripts you can use to do this on your site if you want. Most of them are free.

     We figure when the s.pammers start getting 1000's of e-mails as returned, undeliverable, they will quit spending the money to buy the CD's that have the addresses. This will help cut down on s.pam.

Until next time,