Spam, spam and more spam

By: Mícheál Crotty
Anyone who uses email has more than likely fallen foul of spam at some stage.
Put simply spam is unwanted, unsolicited e-mail sent from a wide variety of annoying companies and individuals. Spam will offer you everything from pre-approved credit cards and loans to tempting business ventures and other corporate ideas. More worryingly spam doesn’t stop here; it extends further into the realm of unwanted correspondence. Not all the e-mails received from spammers are simply annoying offers of business deals, the vast majority are of a more explicit adult nature. Spammers are indiscriminate in who they send unsolicited e-mail to; this raises an even more worrying problem of children becoming the recipients of this type of e-mail.
In a previous article (see Spam – it doesn’t just come in a can!), we outlined several ways to protect yourself from spam email. We also focused on the best ways to avoid ‘spammers’ from getting your email address. These are listed again at the end of this article.
But what if your address has already made it onto a spammer’s list? Several solutions can be proposed to reduce the problem.
The first solution is to use email filtering, where a set of rules are applied to your inbox to sort the email into folders, thus separating the wheat from the chaff. If you use hotmail or yahoo email accounts you can choose to apply email filtering. The disadvantage with this is that it requires you, the email user, to define a set of rules that filter these emails. If you are too lenient in the rules, spam email will still get through, too restrictive and genuine email gets treated as spam.
The second set of related solutions try and make life more difficult for the spammers. One solution suggested by Dr. Ioannidis [1], suggests the creation of single purpose email addresses. These disposable email addresses take the form of a 26 letter username and the standard domain name. Once the original purpose of the email address has been fulfilled then the email address expires. Should the email address be harvested (this is the word used to describe how email addresses are picked up by spammers), it is useless to spammers. However, this does nothing to prevent the email addresses already harvested from being used.
Another more innovative approach, stops spammers at source. Most spammers use automated processes to create an email account, which is then used to send email. When an e-mail provider discovers the spam account, it is disabled. However the automated process allows a new spam account to be easily created. Researchers in Carnegie Mellon university have devised a utility called ‘Gimpy’ to help discourage automated email account creation [2]. Gimpy, uses a form of test, to distinguish between a human and a computer. It selects a word from the dictionary, mangles the word’s image, in a way that is immediately obvious to a human, but defeats a machine. While this may defeat a fully automated process, it cannot totally prevent spam. For example, spammers could hire people to create email accounts manually.
Longer term solutions include legislation to prevent spammers from sending email. This could take time, as it would require legislation in all countries attached to the Internet and there is nothing to prevent a country from introducing more relaxed rules.
It is possible that some or all of the above techniques will form the final solution to preventing spam. Yahoo have already started using the latter technique to help prevent their accounts from being used to send spam email. According to reports Hotmail users can expect something similar very soon.
[1] www.nytimes.com
[2] www.theregister.co..uk
Protect Yourself from Spam
1. When passing on jokes or other information to a large body of people using e-mail only put one address in the To field and put all the other addresses in the Bcc field. This will prevent any recipient of your original mail seeing and passing on all the addresses originally included.
2. Take measures to conceal your e-mail address on your webpage so that it cannot be trawled, there are several ways to do this and a little research will help you on your way.
3. Never reply to a spam e-mail or follow any links that ask you to submit your e-mail address to unsubscribe. Chances are that you will only succeed in telling the spammer that your e-mail account is active and you are available to receive more unwanted mail from them.
4. Set up rules in your e-mail client to reject or disallow e-mails from addresses that you notice as being replicated more than once. This won’t stop the spam being sent but at least you won’t have to look at it.
5. Always check the box to disallow companies from passing on your details to other parties when registering with them online. Most companies provide this feature if you can bear to live without the exciting special offers you may forego.