Spam-Free Email: 9 Ways To Follow…
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Sometimes it is just amazing reading the propaganda put out by government regulatory agencies. Often you just want to say; they are full of beans. Well, I cannot believe what I just read, it seems the FTC is now claiming victory on SPAM because more complaints are coming in from Identity Theft and gasoline price gouging and temporarily the SPAM has gone down to third place? If that is not the most ridiculous cop-out or bunch of malarkey that I have ever heard I do not know what is.
We’ve talked about how you can use anti spam software to kill spam once it reaches you.
But what can you do to become invisible to spam in the first place?
Turns out there are couple of techniques that are pretty easy to implement. Make a habit of these and you’ll be a much harder target for spammers to hit.
1.) Use more than one email address.
Just because US Citizens have gotten use to the abusive SPAM and the FTC has been getting fewer complaints they are calling it a victory. There is no victory, all that we have here is complete Public Relation Propaganda and it makes me sick (opinion). I still get plenty of SPAM as my SPAM filter blocks it, but we are all still paying in higher band-width costs. In fact, I have to go thru my SPAM box every once in a while to insure that no real emails got lost in it?
- The first one should be for immediate family and friends.
- The second, for business contacts.
- The third should be for everything else. And not only that: this one should be disposable.
- What is a disposable email address?
When you give a web site your (disposable) email address, you are giving them an “alias” that corresponds to your main address.
SPAM has gone up 3000% since the FTC took control of the job to fight it. It is probably the worst showing ever in the history of mankind of any regulatory agency. The Mexican Government has been doing a better job against the prolific drug cartel than the Federal Trade Commission against SPAM. I just have to ask, since I am an expert in studying the FTC propaganda machine, abuse of power and utter incompetence: are the American People actually believing this Victory on SPAM comment. Because when I read about this one someone’s Blog recently, I was appalled… [read more]
By default, all aliases of your email address forward your mail to that real address. But only you know that. The web site that sends mail to the alias only has that address — and not your real one.
So here’s what you do…
Use a separate disposable address at each different site. That way if (or when) the spam comes in, you know exactly where it came from. Then, if you like, you can simply shut that alias down — and the spam that goes with it.
Those who use webmails such as Yahoo, Gmail and hotmail will have noticed a spam message folder. This is the folder where messages the email provider suspects as spam are sent, stored for a month or so and then deleted. Most of the time people will not go into this folder at all, because the messages they do want are directed the the inbox. Sometimes however messages are falsely labelled as spam and dropped into this folder, and unless the user is specifically expecting that message, they usually won’t even know.
One downside: What to do if you get some valuable email too, like a newsletter? There’s no easy answer to that: with a disposable address, it’s all or nothing from that site. But at least you’ve identified where the spam is coming from and you’ve isolated it to a large degree.
2.) Disguise your email address.
Instead of signing your comment at a blog with John@Doe.com, do this instead:
The program that does this automatic sorting with such a high success rate is known as a Bayesian Filter, and it actually runs a series of ingenious tests on the titles and content of each email it sees to determine it’s status. Words are assigned a score based on their ’spamliness’ and the entire message is then given a ’spam percentage’. Where bayesian Filters are so effective is that they can learn what sort of mail you like and don’t like and personalise themselves to you. They then allow you to choose the level of security you would like. The levels are basically defined by what score of ’spam percentage’ constitutes spam. For instance if the filter detects a message is 50% likely to be spam this may be flagged as spam on high level security, but not on Medium level.
John@NO_SPAM_Doe.com
The spam robot (“or spambot”) will harvest a useless address. On the other hand, the humans will simply remove the extra words to reach you.
3.) Ignore “Delivery Failure” of any message that you didn’t personally send.
Whenever you see this kind of email, there’s a good chance that you are seeing the outcome of a virus running wild.
For example…
Imagine that a virus has infected your Aunt Maureen’s PC.
Webmails have the added advantage of having a huge pool of customers information to draw from. If the first 50 people to receive a message flag it as spam while no-one passes it, that message will start receiving higher and higher spam scores as it is delivered to other users.
Maybe it is sending out hundreds of infected emails to everyone in her address book. It happens. What you don’t know is that perhaps YOUR NAME is on the FROM: line.
Why?
Another beauty of a bayesian filter is that most of the time you will never know it is there. It cleans your incoming mail before you ever see it, leaving you with (mostly) non spam messages in your inbox after taking out all the (mostly) spam.
Because the spammer wants to hide where the spam is coming from. If every email has Aunt Maureen’s name on it, it’s too easy to track it down and stop it. If, on the other hand there is a different name on each spam, it is much harder to stop.
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Which brings us to you, the innocent bystander. Some of these emails will be going to email addresses that are no longer in service. Some of them might be going to email boxes that are full. Whatever the case may be, the email cannot be delivered. And because your name is listed as the “return address,” you’ll receive a notification of delivery failure.
If you sat a person infront of a computer, and asked them to remove all the spam messages in someone’s inbox, you would expect them to achieve close to 100% accuracy. This implies that there is something innate in a spam email that is recognisable as ’spammy’.
As long as you aren’t getting hundreds of these messages in a single day (or hour!), you can safely ignore it.
[Note: If you ARE getting that many, you might want to scan your PC for viruses and spyware. The spam could be coming from you.]
This is the idea that Bayesian Filters work on. They process emails before they are delivered to your inbox, assigning a ’spam score’ to each word of each message. The average ’spam score’ is then used to determine whether the email is to be spammed or not.
4.) Unless the message is from someone in your address book, assume it is spam.
Most email software can be set to divert all email NOT from someone in your address book into your “Junk” or “Spam” folder. Do it.
Then here’s what you do next:
Bayesian Filters are used by most email providers in some manner. Generally ISP’s will use some form of Bayesian filter to skim the most blatant spam messages off the top, and then leave the filtering of the marginal messages to the email user themselves. Webmails use very efficiently Bayesian filters which draw on both individual and collective data to determine if a message is wanted.
Periodically go in there and browse the accumulated contents. You might find that someone has changed their address, or you are receiving an email newsletter that you actually signed up for. If you want those emails, add the sender to your address list and delete the rest. By the way, this kind of address list is called a whitelist.
5.) Get a good anti spam program — and use it.
Every message that is delivered by webmail is either read or deleted, but webmails, and Bayesian Filter add-ons to conventional mail clients split the deleted messages into two types. They are either deleted because they are no longer needed, or they are deleted as spam. When a message gets deleted as spam the Bayesian filter analyses it and processes the data. The more messages are marked as spam the easier it becomes for the Bayesian filter to identify spam.
In other words, don’t just delete your spam — take the time to hit the blacklist button instead. The more patient you are, the better the anti spam software gets. Let it work for you.
Similarly, don’t disable the anti spam filter (if you use one). No matter how much spam you are getting, you’ll get more if you don’t train your spam filter. The filter is your friend. Let it work for you.
6.) Do not buy anything from a spammer.
So whether you use a webmail or a Bayesian filter add-on with outlook express, the key to achieving the best efficiency from your filter is ensuring you use the ‘delete as spam’ function properly. This is not as easy as it sounds. People have a tendency simply to delete mail from their inbox that is not wanted, be it spam or otherwise. But by doing this you are actually marking the spam that has got through your filter as ‘not-spam’, which makes it easier for the same message to get through again.
Ever. Just don’t. It only encourages them to send you (and me) more spam.
7.) Close the browser window after logging out.
If you are checking your email on the road (say, from a library or coffee shop) you might be using a web-based email service to do so. Be aware that these services will show the name (but not the password) of the last person to log on.
Likewise, people have a tendency to spam legitimate mailings from mailing lists they no longer want to receive. In these cases they have opted in to a list, but no longer want to receive messages so begin spamming them. After enough spammings the message will carry a high spam value and no longer make it to their in box. What these people may not realise is they are also raising the spam value of the mailer for other users, who also signed up and want to receive the messages.
This is supposed to be a convenience to you — but instead it is a significant security problem. Solve that problem by always closing the browser window after you log off.
8.) If you are sending an email to multiple parties, use the BCC option.
Think about it: if you use the CC option, then everyone you are sending the email to is vulnerable to getting spammed — if the email falls into the hands of a spammer.
In both cases the problem is down to the user only wanting to delete mail once - so they either delete everything as spam, or they delete everything normally. To achieve the most efficiency you need to shake this habit. Delete spam as spam and everything else as ‘not-spam’. You’ll find that the more you follow this simple rule, the more effective your Bayesian filter will become, and you will have both less ‘false positives’ and less spam slipping through… [read more]
Even if you trust everyone all the time, some email software will automatically add all the names on the CC line to the address book.
Think of all the people who are receiving this email. Now realize that if any of their PCs gets infected with a virus, everyone in that address book will get a copy of the infected email. Do you really want that? No. So take a moment and use the BCC option.
Similarly, if you forward an email to someone, first take a minute and remove the email addresses of past recipients from the body of the email.
9.) Don’t unsubscribe from an email newsletter that you never subscribed to in the first place.
Sometimes spammers send email to addresses that are made up at random. This is actually easier than getting a list of reliable addresses. The spammer figures that some of the addresses will be undeliverable — but (by chance) a certain percentage will be valid. They’ll know this because the holder of that address will respond to an unwanted newsletter by clicking the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the email. Pretty soon, that email address will receive a ton of spam. Don’t fall for that trick.
Source:www.spamblocker.rubyan.com
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