What is Spam?
It's a rare computer user who
hasn't been bothered by Spam at some stage. By Spam, we mean unsolicited emails
that try to sell you things of a dubious nature that you certainly didn't ask
for and, in all probability, don't need. Everybody hates spam. It can clog up
your email box, threaten the security of your PC, try to trick you into opening
dangerous attachments, and even render the mail box entirely unusable. Here at
Home and Learn, we've had to close down many email addresses due to spam.
(We've only ever met one person who liked spam. This was a pensioner, new to
email, who complained that something was blocking her advertisments. She wanted
to know how she could get them back!)
How do the spammers get hold of my email address?
Spam can come from a wide variety
of sources, and the spammers have many techniques to get hold of your email
address. Here's just a few:
> From a web page
If you have ever posted to an online, public forum, and left your email address
on the page, then it will almost certainly end up in the hands of the spammers.
If you have your own website, and include your email address in plain text,
then that will also get stolen by the spammers. In fact, anywhere on the web
where you leave your email address is a source for the spammers. If you can see
it, so can they.
The way they get the address is by
something called harvesting. This is done with a piece of software called a
Spider. The sole job of the Spider is to trawl through website looking for
email addresses. Once the spammer has enough addresses, he (they are usally
"he's") can sell them to third parties, and other spammers.
> From an infected PC.
A lot of viruses these days contain code to trawl through your email address
book. These will then be sent to the spammer. If you have sent an email to
somebody who is infected, and that person has you in his/her address book, then
your address will be sent to the spammer.
> From YOUR infected PC
If you have a virus, the chances are that it will contain code to control your email.
It will then contact another computer and receive a list of instructions, and
email addresses. These instruction say something like, "Send the following
email to this list of addresses". Your PC won't be sending out thousands
of emails, but just a few. This is because your PC is just one of many thousand
that are controlled by the same spammer (called a botnet). If your computer
sends out just, say, 100 emails a day, then 100 times 1000 computers that the
spammer controls totals 100,000 emails a day. If the spammer controls 10,000
computers then that's a million emails a day he can send out!
> Trial and Error
if you have an email address based on your name, and if your name is quite a
common one, then the spammer will simply send out email trying to guess the
first part. For example, suppose the end of your email address was
"smith.co.uk" And you added "John" to the start, your email
address would be easy to guess, and you'd have a very busy inbox indeed! If it
was "john12_KJ876@smith.co.uk", it's unlikely the spammers could
guess the first part.
Worst case scenarios
If your computer is infected, there
could be another nasty side-effect - YOU get banned! Because your computer has
been indentifed as sending out spam, you may well receive a message from your
service provider telling you that your account has been suspended. You then
have to go to the trouble of contacting your service provider, telling them
that you're not a spammer, and asking what to do to get off their "bad
books".
A more likely scenario is that your
email gets bounced back to you by someone like SpamCop. The email will identify
your IP address, and let you know that you're on a blacklist. SpamCop will keep
you on the blacklist until it receives no more spam from your IP address in a
24 hour period. (It may not be your IP address but the address of your email
servers. In which case, there's nothing you can do about it but notify your
service provider. Your service provider will then totally ignore your call, and
heap the blame on you!)
How to Defeat Spam
You can defeat spam (well, most of
it). Here's a few ways.
- Don't post your email address
on a web page, unless you're disguising it in some way. As an example, an
email address in this format is very difficult for a Spider to read, but
quite easy for a human:
firstBit
@ co. uk. homeandlearn (re-arange the ending)
- Be wary of giving your email
address to websites. Ask yourself, is there a privacy statement anywhere
on the site? Can you easily opt-out if they send an email or newsletter to
you? Do you trust them?
- Never reply to a email sent
to you by a spammer. If you do, you're telling the spammer that the email
address is live and active - the very thing that he was looking for!
(Remember: the spammer probably bought his list off someone else, and has
no idea whether an address is active or not.)
- Careful when opening
attachments. Save the attachment to your hard-drive first, scan with your
(up-to-date) Anti Virus software, and only then consider opening it. If
you weren't expecting an email with an attachment, it's safer to just
delete the entire email!
- Set your email software to
view message as text and NOT as HTML. In Outlook Express you can do this
by clicking Tools > Options from them menu bar. From the Options
dialogue box, click the Read tab. Put a tick in the box "Read
all messages in plain text". The reason you'd want to do this is
because HTML emails can be very helpful to spammers. They insert an image
that tells them the email has been read, and thus that it's a live email
box.
- Consider getting some
Anti-Spam software. The best of these are very good at detecting spam from
the genuine emails. Here's two that Computer Shopper recommended in a
recent review. (Dec 2009)
These both got 5 stars out of 5 in
the review. The second one is only for Outlook or Outlook Express users.
(Mcafee anti-spam got 4 stars out of 5, incidentally, and Norton only got 2!)
A good free anti-spam solution is SpamPal. This got 4 out of 5
stars, but Computer Shopper noted that it was a bit "clunky to set
up".
But we recommend you start with the
free software first, and test it out. If it's not catching at least 90% of spam
coming in, then uninstall it and try something else!