A Beginners Guide to Fighting Spam

Fighting spam is a lot like fighting any other illegal activity. You come up with a strategy and the enemy comes up with a counter strategy that puts yours in the dust. But when it comes to spam, there are some techniques you can use that put you at an advantage.

Automation makes things easier for a spammer. He doesn't have to find each email address and enter each one manually in order to create an email list. Doing so would hardly be worth his time. Since the spammer uses software programs to create the spam lists, there are many programs designed to fight spam, but first it's helpful to know how the spammers get their email lists.

One effective tool that spammers use is called "spambots". These are programs that automatically and randomly browse websites looking for email addresses. It collects these emails and stores them, making large email lists. Sometimes the lists are used directly by marketers, while often they are sold for use by spammers. Though spambots are effective in their technique, there are some ways to fight them.

Get Smart With Your E-Mail
If you don't allow your email to get harvested, it won't. It's difficult to avoid putting your email address in various places, however - when you place a comment on a blog or in a forum, for example -- so knowing how and when to provide your email is important.

When you do provide your email address, give one that's not your primary email address. Create a new email address at one of the free email sites and use that for your "commercial" purposes, like posting on blogs or forums. Once you confirm the email, you don't have to worry about what gets sent there and can do a mass delete once in a while to get rid of all that spam.

Do be aware that email providers like Hotmail and Yahoo are often used for this purpose and some sites have become hip to it. Some will prohibit emails with @hotmail or @yahoo, for example, but there are many more sites that do not. You can have several "junk" email addresses so you can switch it around if you need to.

Be Smarter Than The Spambot
Spambots are smart, but they aren't human and can't reason like a human might. Therefore they can't spot subtle distinctions unless they are programmed to see them. If you can disguise a publicly visible email address, you can often create a situation where the spambot bypasses you. The spambots are generally programmed to look for character strings typical in emails, like johnsmith@domainname.com. The spambot can't think for itself, so sometimes you can confuse them by simply changing the string to something like john_smith_at_domainname.com.

Even if you email is still harvested, it will likely have to be "scrubbed" before being usable to the spambot. Scrubbing routines are hard to write, even harder than writing spambots, because there are many variations. The changes (such as changing the publicly visible email to john_smith_at_NOSPAMdomainname.com) are simple for humans to understand, but hard for programs, which only do what they are programmed to do.

This isn't an ideal method, however. To use the mail, humans must remove the extra letters and insert the @ sign, which is sometimes hard to remember, or that many don't know to do. Also, many emails systems are automated and they, too, will deliver to the wrong address.

There is one other camouflage technique that is sometimes effective. You can configure your email so the receiver doesn't see your actual email, but anything you designate. This is how spammers operate, so you can, too.

Filters
If you have worked to create a good email and you have shared that email with friends, vendors and business associates, that last thing you might want to do it to disguise it. That's contrary to all the hard work you put into making it a solid, memorable and visible email. There are junk mail and spam filters that can help here.

If you get a good filter, it will scan every email before it's delivered to your mailbox to determine whether or not it's junk. You can even configure the junk filters to send everything to your junk folder unless it comes from an email address you have in your address book.

Because these programs are created and function using complex algorithms, you can specify whether the junk mail is actually junk mail and this allows the algorithms to make better guesses next time it sends mail to the junk folder.

While you might wonder if your efforts are getting you anywhere, the reality is that spammers are going to figure out if the effort pays out a solid reward. If they can't get through your many defenses, they'll give up and move on. It might not be perfect, but it's a system that's working better and better for many determined people who want to avoid spammers.

Stopping spam for free isn't rocket science - some simple tips and ideas and some free software is all you need to reduce the amount of spam you get by at least 90%. Find out more about how you can stop the spam menace in your inbox right now. Click on over to http://www.CPUSecurity.com to get started.