|
|
How To Stop It for Good!! - No Fancy Programs, Just TipsMar 16 '01 Write an essay on this topic.
Popular Products in Software
The Bottom Line Its your choice as to how much you get and to what address.
For some strange reason people seem to be all up in arms about Spam Mail. I’m not sure why, I don’t get spammed. It’s impossible you say, well let me clarify, I don’t get spammed to my “real” e-mail address. No I don’t use some spam blocking program or anything either. In the last year I have gotten exactly 2 pieces of spam mail to my actual e-mail address. I do however get hundreds – if not thousands – of spams through my other e-mail accounts. The only people I give out my main mail address to is friends and family. Everything else (including Epinions I might add) gets one of my free accounts I have setup just for such an occasion. There are quite a few ways that potential spammers will get your e-mail address. 1. Forms filled out that require your E-mail address. 2. Bots – These are programs that surf the web extracting e-mail addresses from the sites, newsgroups, message boards etc. and then creating lists from all the names it gathered. 3. Guessing – What a lot of spammers will do is actually create a list of the most common names used by people – i.e. webmaster, admin, carol, bob etc. – and then just go out and add the most popular @whatever.com extensions. How many people want to bet that there is a bob@aol.com? So what can you do to prevent your mailbox from filling up? Well there are several things you can do to prevent e-mail and there are several tips you can do to stop it all together. More than one address There is no law that states that you can only have one e-mail address. Go out to any number of free services and create a new e-mail address. Try Yahoo, Excite, Juno, Hotmail, Rocketmail whatever. Now whenever you fill out a form or post at a newsgroup etc. use the alternate address. Most companies now require an e-mail address and actually will send you a password or the information you require to your address in order to assure that the e-mail address you give them is legit. Even when you sign up for services like Epinions create an address just for this. Now I know from experience that Epinions does not spam, but people could just use this service to gather addresses. I mean there are a lot of addresses on this site that people could grab. Which is probably why so many people have @yahoo.com and @juno.com addresses on this site. Doing this will rid your mailbox of 99% of spam mail. As long as you only use your legit address for friends and family there is little worry about spam. Be wary of Cancellation Requests Most legitimate companies like Microsoft, MSNBC and the such send out newsletters that at the very bottom have a link where you can go to cancel the newsletter and discontinue the spams. These do work, and I have used them to stop getting spam. A lot of the companies use the cancel ploy to find out if the e-mail address they sent the original e-mail to is a legitimate address. When you try to cancel they know that someone is using the address and they just continue to spam. Xoom.com is one that comes to mind right away. No matter how many times I cancelled the service the e-mails kept coming. Of course if you are using a free account you setup just for e-mail then let them send all they want. Just go in a cleanup every so often. Get Yourself a Handle A handle is an alias on the net, i.e. I am known as Destinys-Child. Never use your name in your address like jimjohnson@aol.com or whatever it may be. This is not only easy for spammers to figure out it is also telling everyone on the net exactly who you are. It is a lot harder for a potential spammer to figure out a name if it is something off the wall. My Uncle who is in his 60’s goes by the name of fishingguy on the web. If he can do it so can anyone. Just use a nickname from school or a hobby as an alias. Use an Antipam Program if you must There are programs out there that will filter some types of spam mail from ever getting through to your inbox. Most of the programs look for keywords in the subject line and body of the message to determine if the mail is spam or not. Words like “opportunity”, “business”, “offer” etc. It would set aside these files for you to look through whenever. Some programs would even delete it automatically. This is dangerous seeing as how they are not 100% accurate. I had one a while ago that kept filtering my mothers mail like it was spam. These programs are fine, but they only filter the problem not help it go away. Have fun with Spammers That’s right, if you can why not fight back, and maybe have a chuckle or two in the process. If a spammer sends you an e-mail and it lists a website to go to for more information then go to the site and grab all the e-mail addresses you can. Using a fake address you setup send all the addresses the same thing. My favorite thing to do is just send them the same message they sent me. I actually had one company mail me back after I did this 20 times or so and asked that they be taken off the list and that they were the company that hired me to do it and they weren’t supposed to be on the list LOL. One company threatened legal action if I didn’t stop the unsolicited mail. Now that ones funny since I got their addresses from an unsolicited e-mail. Bottom Line Any way you look at it spam is a part of life. Like telemarketers calling just as you sit down for dinner, spam will always be filling your mailboxes. It is just your decision as to what e-mail address box it fills up. One Rumor I heard this awhile ago from a few people whom I trust, but this still may or may not be true. It seems that AOL users will never be spam free because AOL themselves sell off their member lists to their sponsors so that AOL members will get spam from the people who normally run ads on AOL. This may be true seeing as how I was getting spam to my aol address and I had never used it for anything. The name I was using couldn't have been guessed in a million years and I never once used the address for anything. Yet when I logged on I had 264 messeges waiting, all spam. Funny isn't it?  |
| Read all comments (3)|Write your own comment |
- Top 500|
Ads by Google
|
by texas-swede
