January 15, 2007

What better way to start off the new year than to discuss everyone's favorite subject, spam.

Spammers are getting more sophisticated all the time and keeping up with their shenanigans is not easy.

In one of my past discussions, I discussed filtering messages using other accounts and in another discussion we discussed other options.  Now, some of the spamming techniques have changed, so I'd like to elaborate further.

First of all, you still need a free mail account to use for browsing.  You want to keep your email account information confidential, other than to those people you want to have it.

You will need to continue to have to update your message rules to help eliminate the problematic spam.

As far as I'm concerned, spam software and add-ins for email programs are still useless.  While they will filter the mail and sort it, since they aren't always 100% reliable, so you need to have the software put the messages in a spam folder.  So what's the difference whether you go through the messages in your inbox or your spam folder, you still need to decide yourself, so why pay for the software in the first place?

Now a new technique is making things more difficult.  The newest spam idea is to send the email with coding which spam detectors can't read.  This makes it more difficult for software, or server based hardware to determine which messages are spam.

Another thing to consider, if you have a web site, is that the spammers have software which will crawl the web looking for email addresses in web pages.  Until they find a way to defeat the process, the best way to eliminate this is to have your web master put a java script program in you web pages which will code your email address so it does not appear as readable text in the pages.  I personally had this problem and this method does eliminate the problem.  The only drawback is that you have to change your email address in order to stop the spam.  I have one yahoo email address which I used for web sites, which I haven't used for three years, and it still gets about 100 emails a week, so once you're on their list, it doesn't just go away.

On other words, you'll never totally stop spam, but, with a little effort and care, you can make it more livable.