Spam

And how to deal with it

Before We Start - The Golden Rule

The most important thing to remember when dealing with spam: never, never, never reply to spam.

No matter how angry you are, no matter how much you want to give that unprincipled, opportunistic, slimy, &#@*! spam meister a few choice words of advice... no matter what - do NOT reply to spam. Just delete it. You'll find the reasons why you shouldn't reply further down this page.

What is Spam?

Under Australian legislation it is simply defined as 'unsolicited commercial electronic messages' and does not have to be bulk mailouts, i.e. a single email can be classified as spam.

A more widely accepted definition can be found on abuse.net:

Spam is flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it.

There are several different types of spam, with different purposes.

• Commercial advertising, often pharmaceuticals, watches, company stocks, etc. They will have fake return addresses.
• Nigerian scams - enticing stories of millions of dollars of unclaimed funds that are being offered to you for just a little cooperation. These are scams that will ultimately empty your bank account. They will have a real return address - never reply to these.
• Phishing scams. Purporting to be from your bank, eBay, paypal etc. The aim of these is to make you visit a fake website and input your login details for the bank/eBay/paypal. The sites look very convincing but they are fake. Never respond to these.
• Malware delivery. The only purpose of these is to infect your machine with trojans and viruses. The malware may be attached to the email itself, or you may have to follow a link where the malware will be downloaded and installed automatically.

Preventing Spam

If you are already receiving spam...
If you are already receiving spam on your email address, unfortunately you cannot stop it from being sent to you. All you can do is use a filter to keep it out of your inbox.

If you are NOT already receiving spam...
A few things you should remember:

• Never put your email address on forums, message boards, blogs, etc without disguising it somehow. These are a major source of addresses for spammers
• Take care when subscribing to newsletters, newsgroups etc. Make sure that what you are subscribing to is a reputable service with a solid privacy policy.
• If you have to supply an email address and you only need it work once (e.g. to receive a registration code when registering software) use a temporary address from a service such as mailexpire or Mailinator.

Protect the addresses of your friends and colleagues too - for example:

• when sending emails to multiple recipients add them as a "BCC" instead of "To".
• don't enter their addresses into website forms, such as e-card sites or "tell a friend" pages.

Replying to Spam

One word - don't.

Think about this - if you were the spammer and you were going to send out a million spam emails today, would you put your own email address on it as the sender, for everyone to reply to? Of course you wouldn't! The return address that they use will be either a non-existent address or an innocent person's stolen address.

So if you reply to a spam email one of two things will happen: your message will never be delivered because the address is non-existent, or some poor unsuspecting soul will receive your tongue lashing - and then perhaps classify you as a spammer!.

Furthermore, if the message does have a return address to the spammer, replying will only tell them that they have found a real, active email account, and you can look forward to the prospect of ever-increasing spam traffic!