Community Newsletter: Q&A forum: What can I do to stop spam?

If you really want to do something, go to www.spamcop.net and sign up for a free reporting account. You copy the entire e-mail, including headers, into a box. The web-based program analyzes the e-mail and sends an e-mail to the people in charge of the network where the e-mail originated. It's not perfect and there are some domains (especially in Asia and other non-English speaking countries) that don't have a way to contact them. (E-mails sent previously have bounced, etc.) I don't know how effective it really is, but the amount of spam I get today is much less than two years ago (August 2005: 368, August 2007: 72).

Spammers use botnets to distribute their garbage, so it's likely that the computer that sent the spam belongs to somebody who has no idea what happened.

If you do change e-mail addresses, be careful with the new one. Use a "throwaway" address for signing up for services, especially at sites you don't trust 100%. I get so much spam at my Yahoo address, I wouldn't be able to find a real one in that mess.

Good luck.

What ever else you might do, NEVER open the email and look for an unsubscribe link. Just mark each one as JUNK for your email server to redirect. If you open the email and click on the unsubscribe link, yes you might cancel that one, but you also confirm that your address is valid and current, and open yourself up to receiving more of the same. Unfortunately, this will be a never ending process, as these spammers are always looking for ways around the safeguards. If you don't recognize the name of the sender, or believe the message in the subject line, then mark it as junk. For example, if you never use eBay, you can believe that any message saying that your account has been suspended, is a spoof. Same for PayPal. Also remember, check your junk email file before it is deleted, just in case a legitimate new contact, has been directed there. Most email servers should have a way of marking this address as safe, and future mailing will hit your inbox.

With Outlook as part of Office, you can set up "Spam Recognition" options and all such mail goes into a spam folder so that you can check it just in case something valuable slipped through.

My sister updates her email address once a year (K2006, K2007 etc.) and finds this moderately successful.

I only use Outlook Express, and use gmail for all my accounts, and they run a filter for you, so when I download my mail, I get a very limited number of xxXXX extension options, but still enough that I have to sling it over my shoulder, run it back down my trouser leg and tuck it into my shoe.

On the few occasions that I've gone directly into the gmail site and checked the junk folder, I have NEVER found anything that should have been sent to me.

Yes, technically, you should only have to open one of these emails and respond with "unsubscribe", but some unscrupulous email churning houses use this as recognition that you read their crap so they send you more! Another problem with "unscubscribe" is that you get a server message telling you that the original sender's account doesn't exist.

Never openly publish an email address on a forum. If, say, you wanted to send me your email adress, do it through a private message.

Create at least a second email account for fora and subscriptions. That way your personal account remains with your friends and your junk account can be closed if it ever becomes unmanageable. You just then have to go to your usual sites (like this one) and update to your replacement "junk" account.

My last resort against popups and spam was to use "whois.com" to find an email that belonged to the owner of the site being promoted, and then through PayPal, invoice them for my bandwidth and time. I never got any money, but some of the junk has definitely dried up.

I've used gmail and guess what, I've received hundreds of spams weekly but all of them are seperated into a seperate spam folder. Gmail's spam filter has little false positive (when it does, the emails are suspicious in the first place) and it misses only few mails, which is in the range of one mails per several months.

I'm not specifically recommending gmail, just that you need an email with a good spam filter. If the server doesn't provide you with one, there are many softwares out there that handles the spam filtering on your local email program (Outlook or similar, if you used one to access your email).

There is also a need to be precaution on who you give away your email address to. Make sure you don't give away email to just anybody you meet on the street, make sure you know that the one you entrust your email address is reliable and trustworthy. Tell your friends not to give away your email address to anyone without your consent, tell them not to do be tempted to press the Send This to a Friend button on sites that aren't trustyworthy, or if unsure not to press such kind of button at all.

This is one of the biggest problems out there in my opinion. You could open each one and look for an unsubscribe button if you wish, but in my experience that rarely does anything to help the problem. The main reason for this is because when you click unsubscribe you are taken to the site that sent you the email. When companies that put these emails out see that you in fact visited that site they will send you more emails from a different site. At first I was getting maybe 3-5 spam emails a day, but once I clicked on the link and "unsubscribed" I started getting more and more. I'm up to about 20-35 a day now. So it is best to just keep mass-deleting them. This problem seems to be worse with email address from sites like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, and some other free sites. But you will run into this issue no matter which provider you use.

I talked about what's working now, but I didn't talk about what I tried before.

I tried "I Hate Spam" -- pretty good, but "good" e-mails ended up in my quarantine folder, so I had to look at it everyday. Automatic "bounce" almost never resulted in turning off the spam sender, and ran the risk that my ISP would burn me for too much outgoing activity. Big time waster.

I tried turning on my ISP's (DSLExtreme) spam filter. Better, because I didn't download the spam first, but worse because I had to go to the webmail everyday to check the spam folder (for the same reason -- it was getting some of my "good" emails. Again, time waster.

I tried TrendMicro's spam protection -- almost nonexistant.

I tried alternate Gmail and Yahoo accounts for junk, but that didn't solve the issue that my primary e-mail address was still in the hands of hundreds or thousands of spammers.

With the SpamArrest challenge-response system, I only log in when I subscribe to a newsletter and want to add it to my whitelist. I didn't have to change my e-mail address. Since the challenge-response goes out through my spamarrest account, I don't have to worry about my ISP shutting me down for excessive e-mail usage.

I also echo the responses by others to NOT open or otherwise click on any spam links to unsuscribe as that's just proof to them that you're address was a good one and it'll go on a higher priced e-mail list for them to sell.

I hope these added comments have been helpful.

Don

Dear Jo B.

I did get a lot of those e-mails but for your solution, you could try to filter the type of e-mail you want to receive or by unsubscring from all the services you don't like and then you'll be able to see the deference.

Regards
Mpho

Hi Jo B.

First things first don't open them, the reason being is, most spammers target the net through remote servers or workstations.
These fire out thousands of emails at random hoping to strike lucky, if you open one then the server knows it's hit a genuine address and so just bombards you even more.
You've been doing the right thing by just deleting them without reading and so have not confirmed your address.
You did not say what email software you use so I will go by the assumption it is MS Outlook.
If this is the case then here's what to do, click on file and create a new folder called junk mail.
When the emails you don't want arrive in your inbox then left click on your mouse over each one.
The set of instructions you get gives you the option to go to junk e-mail. from there you then add sender to blocked list.

When you have done this each time these emails arrive they will automatically be sent into the created junk mail folder and you can then delete the whole lot in a oner.

or.

By going into the junk mail again and at the bottom it says junk email options. click on this and tick the box that says delete junk mail instead of moving to junk folder.

Hope this helps

I think you are in the same position many of us come across occasionally. Limited spam, to me, requires a multi-layered approach.

The first layer should be a server rejecting all mail from known spam sources. There are published lists (or blacklists) and software to make this easy for ISPs. If your ISP does not do this, sham on them

The second layer also should be on the mail server. A open source program that many small to medium ISPs use is SpamAssassin. It may not be perfect, but it eliminates tons of spam using a system the assigns values to things like all caps and words like Viagra. The totals are compared to thresholds you can adjust as to whether it is spam or not.

The last layer is on your machine. Any spam filter will do but I personally use Cloudmark Desktop. It determines spam by using feedback from all of their users. If you receive an e-mail that is spam, when you mark it as spam it tells the Cloudmark servers that it is spam. So, this way you get the benefit of every other Cloudmark user's marking their spam before you. This is a subscription service but, in my opinion, it's worth every penny.

I work for an ISP and when I get a call for help from someone in your exact situation, I open Outlook Express (I use Outlook for my mail) enter their username and password, download their mail and let Cloudmark at it. I then delete the spam and I have a happy customer.

I used to also use another program in addition to the above called BlueFrog by Blue Security. They reported spammers to their ISPs and/or government agency and were so successful, they were a target of multiple DoD attacks by spammers and were forced to shut down their servers. It's an amazing story you may want to Google and read about.

There are many other spam filtering software packages out there and I have tried many of them but this combination of layers seems to work the best for me.

Yea. I've had that experience too, coming back to see a couple hundred spam email. You mentioned some of them have real-seeming names. Some of them probably are real people whose computers are infected with a backdoor virus that sends mail to list upon lists of people.
First of all, what sort of mail server do you use? If you are using a common internet mail service then most of them (Yahoo!, gmail, hotmail) have anti-spam functions such as a "bulk" folder option. Very occasionally it filters emails you actually want, but it's worth turning on. Also, they have a "mark as Spam" or block button and these will make sure you don't get the mails from these people anymore. Check to see if you have that first.
If you are using a company/organization specific email, and are using a program to manage/save those emails, you will want to:
A)Check with the email service about what they offer for anti-spam
B)A lot of programs (outlook, etc) have block lists and anti-spam functions. Look up spam or blocking in its help.

Oh, and don't unsubscribe to spam. All that does is tells them that "This person exists and checks his/her email" and they send your name to even more people for spam.

Good luck solving the problem!

I am in Rochester, NY where I listen to a radio Show every week on WHAM 1180 called Sound Bytes. Their claim to fame is that they are the longest running Computer show in the nation. They forwarded this advice, (below) a long time ago.

If it is spam or scam they can back door you when you go to unsubscribe!

Do not open the spam or click on the "unsubscribe" button, as far as am being told this is another "gotcha" where you are opening up yourself and your system to more solicitations or worse.

Use the spam blocker and block all messages then just delete them. You can set the anti-spam program to flush them every so often so you don't have to.

Hi Jo B.,

Do NOT open the spam, nor click the so-called "unsubscribe" link. Opt-out links in unsolicited e-mail are there simply to make them less obvious. Far worse, as soon as you click one, you let the spammer know that you actually looked at their letter. Some spam messages also have embedded trackers, to let the spammer know when you so much as open them; or even malware (Perhaps you've heard of the Storm worm?) that will infect your computer and add it to a "botnet." Then, your computer will become one of those responsible for all this spam!

Really, the easiest way to immunize yourself against this ever-growing pandemic of spam and phishing fraud is to migrate to an e-mail provider with Challenge-Response spam filtering, such as Bluebottle. This name is actually so familiar in spammer/phisher circles that they almost never try to send anything to Bluebottle accounts.

Challenge-Response filters work by maintaing a whitelist - and usually a blacklist as well - of e-mail addresses. When a message from an unknown sender arrives, it is quarantined in a "pending" folder. The sender is then sent a "challenge," requesting that they respond (usually just by clicking a link) in order to verify that they are human. Spammers use networks of "zombies," computers infected with malware which they control remotely, to send out mass quantities of spam, and these machines are incapable of responding to such challenges as of yet.

In addition to requiring your new pen pals verify themselves, you can also add new addresses to your whitelist yourself, to save someone this small inconvenience if you are already expecting e-mail from them; or go into the pending folder and authorize the sender subsequently. Pending messages usually remain in the folder for seven days before they are automatically purged.

If migration is out of the question for you, the next-best suggestion I can offer you is MailWasher. It's a middle-man program that sits between a POP e-mail client and the servers, offering a preview of what's in your inbox and enabling you to "bounce" unwanted messages, making your account appear inactive. I should mention that bouncing is not enabled by default, and the program by very nature is a bit more technical than an average user would be prepared for. Also, note that it works only for e-mail accounts with POP3/SMTP services (free Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts do not offer these services).

Beyond that, are you using Yahoo! Mail? Almost every person I talk to with your problem is referring to a Yahoo! account. The problem is that Yahoo! is one of the oldest free e-mail providers, and was once the better of Hotmail in a two-horse-race. Yahoo! has the largest user database of them all, and remains the primary target for data mining and account hijacking/spoofing. And, I'm sorry to say, their spam filter just doesn't cut it.

I understand that Gmail is also starting to show some vulnerabilities of its own, but that's a story for another day, methinks. Bottom line: If you're talking about a Yahoo! Mail account, there's your problem. I hate to say it, but that's just the way it is.

I have only read a dozen or so responses to reducing spam on this thread and none of them addressed a source of e-mail harvesting that has put many spam e-mails in my inbox. These are the chain letter e-mails that well meaning friends and relatives will send with the best of intentions. They may start with "Please help find Jane Doe", or "You are my friend because ....", or some other friendly subject line. They tell some emotionally charged note about how much you are loved or how you need to help find some lost child or other message that make you feel all warm and fuzzy about sharing with the rest of your address book. I've done this enough times that I know it's effective. Respond to the sender and all others that are cc:'d on the same note with a firm reminder that the chain mail that they have sent is an opportunity for proliferation of verified e-mail addresses to spammers. (I spend the time to strip out every e-mail address in the entire e-mail and create a list for emphasis to show how it can be done.) I firmly and in a few cases sternly let the sender know that I do not appreciate them sharing this usually worthless e-mail with me and please refrain from adding my e-mail address in the cc: box when sending this type of stuff. If they feel there is some compelling reason to send me this stuff then cut the body of the mail and paste it into a fresh e-mail to only my address. Eventually these chain e-mails are intercepted and fresh e-mail addresses are added to the spam list. These new addresses are confirmed addresses since the sender typically just adds their whole address book which is often up to date. Once I send the firm message out most folks will be surprised that this type of e-mail address harvesting is done and will cease this type of activity. Some folks will be indignant that you would accuse them of proliferating spam. To them I say "I'm sorry you are offended but it's true." The rare person in my address book that repeats the offense gets a repeat send of the same type of note. A third offense, (yes it has happened) gets a more stern response, and because I cc the original list of addresses that the note came with, the result is a public admonishment. This has worked for me. Only one "friend" has offended again after a third note and that resulted in a blistering, rude and demeaning note back from me and their e-mail address is now blocked. My personal address has been active for over 11 years and this "Tough Love" approach along with all the other tips you will have read by now have kept my spam load down to only a couple a week. I typically receive 10 to 15 e-mails a day some are subscriptions (Like CNET) some are friends and relatives a few rare work related notes and even more rare are the spam messages. Yes, I have been called many names by friends and relatives but I do have an address that is an effective communications method and the friends and relative that truly do care for me still communicate with me via this method.
I also must second the use of free "dummy" e-mail addresses. I have 5 e-mail addresses: 1-professional address (9 1/2 years and only a few dozen spam mails over all those years); 2-personal address (11+ years and only a few spam messages a week due to diligence and the "Tough Love" responses to friends); 3-Junk mail #1 for subscribing to online offers, registering software, online purchasing; 4-Junk mail #2 for responding to questionable online offers, advertisements that have my curiosity (I never respond to anyone with this address I just occasionally empty the entire inbox into the junk mail filter after reading only the responses I was expecting); 5-Test e-mail address,(This account I use to forward any questionable mail that I receive on my personal or professional accounts. If junk mail shows up related to the questionable mail I then black list the address from my personal/professional account)
I check my personal and professional e-mail two or more times a day. I check "junk mail #1" a couple times a week. I check "junk mail #2" and "test e-mail" maybe once a week sometimes not even that but at least once a month to keep the accounts active. Yes this is a lot of work, I spend 10 to 15 hours a week on e-mail activity but it has been effective.

Whatever you do, don't open the emails. Not even to see if there is an unsubscribe link. First of all, opening an email could download a virus, trojan, worm, etc. to your computer. Secondly, at the very least, by opening the email, and clicking on unsubscribe, you are letting the person that sent that spam know that yours is indeed a valid email address and they could keep bombarding you with more spam or sell your address to other spammers as a working email address.

The best thing to do is to apply a junkmail filter to the spam so that it does not get through next time. Most email programs have this as an option for you to use. I hope this helps.

Just a quick note. DO NOT do an "UNSUBSCRIBE" from these sites. That will just confirm that you are a valid address with a person there. Ignore the e-mail and add it to a "block" list with you e-mail provider.