How does spam work?

At its simplest, spam is the mass mailing of a single email to thousands, millions or billions of recipients. The spam perpetrator ('spammer') obtains a list of valid email addresses from one of several sources (more on this later), then fires out as many emails as he or she wants, hoping to get one or two percent of profitable responses. Commercial spam is like telemarketing on steroids. Instead of one call at a time, you can send thousands of emails in a very short period, with really no expense besides the bandwidth necessary to mail out all that email, or just the cost of the Internet connection itself.

The second most common source of spam are the many email propagating viruses, or 'worms' on the Internet. Once a computer is infected with one of these programs, it will email a copy of the virus accompanied by a sometimes deceptive, often inane message, to every email address known by the system. If these emails are opened, the worm will reproduce itself exponentially, creating more junk email, etc. etc.

 

What Makes Spam Tick?

 

Of course, the rise of spam traffic on the Internet has not gone unnoticed by Internet service providers. Many ISP's have instituted some form of spam filtering technology between their customers and the Internet to delete the most obvious forms of spam. These measures are of varying effectiveness, but do help reduce some of the background noise.

In addition, many home Internet Service providers include provisions against sending spam as part of their fair-use agreements for the service. Of course, this is at the discretion of the company, but it is in the interests of a home service provider not to have its members bombarding each other with spam.

Because of this, whole companies are in the business of supplying email services to would-be spam merchants. They provide the Internet access and email servers and the spammer provides the content.

The idea of a national do-not-spam list has been proposed in the United States, but has never really gotten off the ground. This is mainly due to a host of reservations as to how it will affect legitimate online businesses, and the (probably very real) fear that a national list of valid email addresses will simply attract more spam. The latter point illustrates the main problem with legal action vs. spam email senders.

The required operating costs are so low for sending out spam that the people who do it are under no real pressure to operate their businesses legally. This is different from the spammer's closest analog, telemarketing companies. While equally annoying, they need employees and expensive phone lines and equipment to function, meaning they must run a (at least semi-) legitimate business and a national do-not-call list would be effective. No such insurance exits with spammers, and a national do-not-spam list would almost certainly be abused.

 

How did you get on a spammers mailing list?

 

Most commercial spam emails are sent using huge lists of email addresses, bought or otherwise acquired by the spammers. It's important to remember that your email address (at least your main one) is a commodity on the Internet. This is why so many sites (especially those offering free services such as software downloads or contests) want your email address. If they have your address they can contact you later, and unless they specifically state that they will not, they can also pass the address on so that others can contact you. In the past, many online businesses have sold their customer lists to raise money or during the process of bankruptcy. If you are prompted for an email address and it does not specifically state that your address will not be used for marketing purposes, be wary. You might well become added to a spammers list.

Of course, there are other ways that commercial spammers can harvest your email address. Automated software tools that search through web pages and record any email addresses that they come across are one method, and equivalent tools are also used to pore through newsgroups in search of useable addresses. For this reason, it is advisable not to display your email address when posting within forums.

One of the most common methods, used by many commercial sites and services on the web is the 'opt-in' box, as first seen in those annoying magazine pullout subscription flyers ('YES!! Please sign me up to receive 12 issues of pet taxidermy monthly and send me my free Elvis bust!').

In the Internet age, these take the form of the ubiquitous set of check boxes at the bottom of the sign up page, pre-checked for you of course, and offering "relevant information from time to time," "great offers from our partners," etc. etc. It all adds up to the potential for unsolicited spam if the vendor is unscrupulous and you are careless with your email address.

 

Techniques to Avoiding Spam

As mentioned earlier, emails triggered by viruses are also a leading source of spam. The most insidious of these may be received directly from people you normally correspond with over email, but the majority are from seemingly random addresses or disguised ones, an example being the recent 'Microsoft patch' worm known as 'W32.Dumaru @ mm' which you may have received in the hundreds over the past few months. This worm disguises itself as being from 'security @ Microsoft.com'

Mass-mailing worms such as w32.Dumaru scan files in your computer as part of the process of infection, and can pull email addresses from many other sources besides your Outlook Express address book. In fact, most recent worms can extract email addresses from stored .html files in your Internet Explorer history folder, meaning any email address on any web page you have visited recently is going to get spammed by you if you unwittingly infect your computer.

Techniques to Avoiding Spam

Let's look at some methods you can use to stem the flow of garbage into your inbox. Several of these are pure common sense, but by applying all of the methods together, you can armour yourself quite effectively against spam. Unfortunately, there is still not really a reliable method for stopping the spam from reaching you altogether without losing the occasional important message, so the below methods focus on filtering spam out to 'junk' folders and addresses so you do not have to pick through it to get at your regular mail, blocking out repeat senders of unwelcome email, and using common sense to avoid common 'spam traps' in the first place.

 

Junk addresses

One of the best ways of avoiding spam is to not avoid it at all, but to actually welcome it, with open arms into an email address that you have no intention of checking. Make a Hotmail account, or the equivalent (you know, boxospam @ somesite.com) and use this address when you are registering or filling out forms for companies you have no interest in ever receiving email from. Empty the thing out once a month if you like, but otherwise you can happily let the junk mail accumulate in a tidy pile away from your view.

Opt-out of opt-ins

As we stated before, it is highly unlikely that any of the pre-checked offers from whoever you just signed up with are going to offer you anything besides more spam to clutter up your inbox. The sensible thing to do is to uncheck anything you are not sure you want to receive. This will help cut down on your spam quotient.

Note that while many spam emails will offer a link to allow you to remove yourself from their mailing list, this is often not a sensible thing to do. While 'legitimate' commercial email purveyors may respect your wishes on this front, replying to the addresses provided may simply serve to confirm your email address as working and invite more spam. Better to use one of the below methods to block it out completely.

Using Outlook Express message rules to filter spam

Outlook Express contains a simple set of message handling rules that you can put into effect to sort your incoming mail. Depending on the subject, the sender, the contents of the email or its attachments, you can choose to stream email to a separate folder or even delete it automatically.

In effect, OE will examine your incoming mail and decide how to handle it based on the rules you specify. Message rules are useful for filtering out repeating spam like the fake Microsoft patch email, or spam that covers a certain subject (you might wish to block out the V-word for example, or possibly 'add inches...').

 

How to institute message rules

To apply message rules first open Outlook Express.We need to create a new folder within Outlook Express. Right click on 'local folders' and select 'new folder.' Call the new folder 'spamcan' for now.

Go to 'tools\message rules\mail…' to open the new message rule window.

 

 

From here, our first step is to choose the 'condition' the thing(s) that we wish to avoid in our email. Simply check the conditions you wish to apply, then specify the exact details in the 'rule description' pane at the bottom.

For example, if you are receiving spam emails with the subject line 'earn $$$ at home,' check the 'where the subject line contains specific words' box, then click the underlined link in the 'rule description' pane.

 

 

In the 'enter specific words' window, type 'earn $$$ at home' and click 'add,' then 'ok.'

Now we need to specify the action to be taken when Outlook Express finds an email with the condition(s) you specified. As you can see, there are a number of options, including deleting the offending emails automatically. Be cautious with the delete option though, since you could end up destroying useful mail. This is why we created a 'spam' folder so we can funnel our useless messages there to be checked one or twice a month.

Filtering with Message Rules

To continue the example, say we want all messages with 'earn $$$ at home' in the subject line to be placed in the 'spamcan' folder we created. Check the 'move it to the specified folder' box, then in the 'rule description' pane, click the underlined link and specify the 'spamcan' folder as the target.

 

 

Now our rule is complete. Give it a name and click 'ok' to apply it to all future mail.

This is one example of how message rules can be useful, but I've found that when the message rules begin to pile up, they don't always work 100%. Other good uses are to funnel all email containing attachments into a separate folder where they can be handled with care, or even just organizing your mail by funneling messages from specific people to specific folders. There are more effective ways of organizing your email though, and we will look at one example of this later in the article when we combine message rules with a third party sorting program to try and block spam more proactively.

Blocking spam with Outlook Express

You can also use the message rules menu in Outlook Express to easily block mail from a specific address. This function (the 'blocked senders' list) automatically funnels all mail from these sources into the deleted mail folder. To set an address to be blocked:

Open Outlook Express, go to 'tools\message rules\blocked senders list'.

 

 

Click 'add' then type in the address you wish to block. Click 'ok.' That's it.