By now, most people know that if we talk about spam and the Internet, we are
not talking about a meat product that hackers wash down with Jolt Cola. We're
talking about bulk e-mail and bulk posting to Usenet newsgroups, the
Internet's electronic bulletin boards.
Direct marketers can now build enormous data bases of e-mail addresses and
Usenet newsgroups that they then sell to customers who want to reach hundreds
of thousands of people. Sometimes, an individual will harvest his own list of
e-mail addresses.
For the same reason that millions of us find e-mail a convenient way to
communicate with friends and relations all over the globe, direct marketers
have discovered the power of the Internet. It's a cheap, easy, and efficient
way to announce your better mousetrap to thousands of people-in minutes.
Spammers have lots of ways of harvesting your address. The more active you
are on the Net, the greater your chance of being spammed. For example, my
e-mail address is listed as a contact on many different web pages at work and
in other contexts. Further, I post notes to several newsgroups and belong to
a dozen electronic mailing lists. And I've filled in forms at many of the Web
sites I've visited.
All the traces you leave on the net make it easier for the purveyors of
pictures of naked ladies, allegedly lower long-distance rates, quick weight
loss schemes, and world-class laundry detergents to find you, and hundreds of
thousands of your closest friends.
If you get 1 or 2 spams a day, it's not that big a deal. In fact, it's easier
to delete spam than it is to discard the bulk mail you find in your mailbox
at home or to tell a tele-marketer you don't need another credit card.
But 5-50 spam messages a day can be a nuisance. Spam is particularly annoying
if your Internet account has limitations. Have a limited inbox? Too much spam
may mean you'll lose mail you want to receive. Paying by the minute? Then
it's costing you to receive all those special offers.
There is no magic bullet for dealing with spam. But there are some things you
can try.
First, if the spam contains information about how you can remove yourself
from a marketer's list, do so. But be forewarned that some shady spammers are
just trying to lure a reply from you to validate your e-mail address.
Second, if your e-mail package allows it, you can filter your incoming
e-mail. Many e-mail programs let you create rules or lists that let you
delete unwanted mail before you open your inbox, but you usually have to add
the spammers' addresses yourself.
The Internet EMail Marketing Council
(www.iemmc.org)
lets you add your e-mail
address to a "global filter" against bulk e-mail. But not every marketer
sends their bulk e-mail through the IEMMC filtering system, and the computers
doing the filtering are overloaded.
Third, you can remove some of your Net traces. If you are getting spammed
heavily, remove your AOL profile, take your e-mail address out of "voluntary"
directories, and unsubscribe from mailing lists whose traffic you read
sporadically.
Finally, you can delve through the full headers of spam you receive, locate
the source of the spam, or its relay points, and complain politely to two
e-mail addresses at those sites: postmaster and abuse. But sometimes the
spammers can mask their true origins, making this an exercise in futility.
It's depressing, but often the quickest solution is just to delete the stuff
unread.
For more information
- See the current issue of KFH's Internet Voyager (Issue 3.5, September/October
1997; 800-897-8230 for subscription information).
- Visit the Ziff-Davis Anchordesk report for August 19, 1997
(www.anchordesk.com/story/story_1170.html).
- Look in your e-mail package's manual or help files to learn about filtering
unwanted e-mail and viewing the full headers of incoming e-mail.