Five tips for reducing SPAM

Buried alive!

SPAM is slang for unsolicited emails of a commercial nature. Like all soloists, you most likely find SPAM a huge time waster and major irritant. There is a way of reducing SPAM!

The Australian Government SPAM Act 2003, states all “Commercial electronic messages must contain a functional unsubscribe facility”. However, sometimes clicking the unsubscribe link validates your email address as “live” to the message sender. Rather than reducing SPAM, this may result in receiving more SPAM!

Here are five simple tips for reducing SPAM:

1. Many email applications have a Junk Email feature that will seek out messages that have key text such as Free or Rolex or Make Money and so on, and automatically send them to a Junk Email folder for you to deal with.

2. Some email applications have rules that enable you to specify a subject or key word (as above) and then send the mail straight to the deleted items or trash bin on arrival.

3. Check to see if your Internet Security or Virus Checking software has an inbuilt spam filter. These days there are various spam and Ad-Ware filtering software available to help reduce spam, just type in “Spam Filter” in a search engine such as Google and a long list will be found.

4. Be careful who you provide your email address to, i.e. when signing up for a mailing list, be sure you are happy to receive information from that site and check their privacy and whether they provide the ability to unsubscribe.

5. Talk to other people about how they go about reducing SPAM and what technologies they use.

Finally, a question I am often asked by soloists is what do to with unwanted messages which are sent to their domain even though they have not set up the address. Typical examples are sales@yourdomain.com or info@yourdomain.com

The answer? Contact your Domain host. When a soloist’s domain name is “hosted” by a company, they assume you will have an inquiry/sales type address as well as your own personal address. In order to ensure no mail is missed if people don’t know your personal address, the domain host company will often redirect anything with @yourdomain to you so you don’t miss out. However you ought to be able to reverse this. Give them a call to find out what they can do.

Donna Hanson specialises in computer and technology related education for business and corporate users. Her company provides customised training and resources to help users understand and increase their knowledge of computer related technology.

4 comments | Add your own

Latest evil trick is to code SPAM with invisible text tags and code the rest with letter spacing, it appears as a normal "viagra" text but allot of text is only visible in the code of the message.
You have to do the following in Outlook Express.
1. Highlight the SPAM message then right click
2. Select "Properties"
3. Click the "Details" tab
4. Click "Message Source" bottom right
5. Search the text for some irrelevant phrase in relation to the message and block all messages containing that phrase either via message rules or on your server admin.
Current Spam is using an invisible tag on the text in the "Message Soruce" to get around users adding the visible text to banned words and message rules, they use a few sentances containg terms like "Harry Potter" so I added "Harry Potter to the blacklist on my server and reduced my the majority of seemingly previously unblockable SPAM.
Take for example the term "Viagra" you cna ban it but the code being used makes it V I A G R A, it appears as VIAGRA. you can't ban seprate letters of the alaphabet or most of your emails would never arrive.
Strange thing is they include these few irrelevant sentences in invisable text with terms you that you can ban, must have some kind of heart under all that SPAM.
Adam from Gold Coast
Great article and thanks Adam, for a great tip. My contribution is the address for SPAM reporting -
www.acma.gov.au/STANDARD:296179025 Grant Hyman from Sydney | Read my articles
Email client spam filters and rules are OK, as are specialised spam filters which come with anti-virus and security software. They are howver, difficult to configure and only deal with the spam once you have downloaded it. It is a far better idea to tackle as much spam as possible at your ISPs servers. Most major ISPs offer spam filters, as do many of the smaller, local ISPs (my ISP, Highlands Internet, offers a good one which also catches a lot of viruses). I also use MailWasher Pro a a double check! Sure, the ISPs charge for their filters, but only a few dollars a month and its worth it! Keith Mewes from Bowral, NSW
My tip is to use Google. Google gmail has one of the best spam filters in the world and is always being updated.. so this is how it works. (1) create a free account eg john.eats.spam@gmail.com (2) divert your normal email to that account (3) setup your email program to pick up john.eats.spam@gmail.com.... and you can initially log into your Google account on the web and check the spam it has collected (in case a good one is filtered) and you have a web storage (backup) of ll your email. Google storage is very liberal as well. Steve Fisher from Brisbane

4 comments | Add your own

Add Your comments

Preview comment

Name

Website *

Town / city and country

Email (never sold, displayed or given away)

* This will link your name to your site. So please avoid self promotion elsewhere! We delete spam, disrespectful or off-topic comments.