Website reviews

Sites that offer help in dealing with spam email

The Journal, November 2006, page 45

SPAM is a processed canned meat. The name is a syllabic abbreviation of “SPiced hAM” and the product itself has acquired a place in popular culture. In particular, a Monty Python (www.pythonline.com) sketch set in a café with an unusually SPAM-laden menu will be familiar to many. Believe it or not, this comedy sketch was the origin of the term which is used to describe multiple junk emails or Usenet postings, recounting the repetitive and unwanted presence of SPAM in the sketch.

I get an obscene amount of email (and also an amount of obscene email) and most of it unsolicited spam. It’s my own fault, really – I was young and naïve and didn’t know any of the handy hints I am about to share with you.

ez2ba.com

http://ez2ba.com/html/sitetoys/obfuscate-email.html

The main reason for the amount of spam I receive is that my email address is listed on more than one website. I put it there in most cases, so I can’t complain. The best thing you can do to avoid getting avalanches of email therefore is not to have your email address on the internet. Simple.

Yes, but not very practical. Your firm’s website is not going to be very useful to the average user if they can only get in contact with you once they buy a stamp. So you need to have your email address on show for your customers, but hidden from those who would use it to try and sell you Canadian pharmaceuticals. Fortunately, the people who want to use your email for spam don’t tend to bother visiting websites individually. Instead they send robots.

Without wishing to sound too sci-fi, these “spam-bots” are little computer programmes which spider across the internet and harvest email addresses by the thousand to deliver to their evil spamming masters. Luckily, the spam-bots don’t read webpages, only the code behind them – and it is possible to write code in a way which will confuse the robots.

Don’t worry if you’re not particularly technically minded, this website (pronounced “easy to be a dot com”) is very easy to use and offers two different possible solutions, one in simple HTML and the other in Javascript. Either will help to obfuscate your email address and hide it away from the spam-bots. It won’t stop you getting spam altogether, and it won’t solve an existing problem – but it should keep a new email address from being overloaded too quickly.

Thunderbird

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/

If it’s too late for your email address, then what you need is an effective email filter. Thunderbird has exactly that, and it’s free to download. As well as being a really good email application generally, it can help you deal with spam. Many email programs (including the one you’re probably using at the moment) rely on rudimentary criteria to determine whether an incoming email is spam or not. The problem with this is that either you get too much spam sneaking through the filter or you end up with legitimate email in the spam bin. Thunderbird has no preconceived ideas of what spam looks like (after all, you may have requested lots of information about performance enhancing substances). Rather, it learns what’s spam and what’s not according to the user’s own instructions. Whenever an unwanted email arrives, simply click the “junk” icon and the program sweeps it off to Room 101 to be punished for its crimes. The next time the same email (or similar) arrives, Thunderbird remembers what to do and sends it off to join its friends. I use this program at home and at work and it works very well.

Advertising Standards Authority

www.asa.org.uk

Having tried all that to no avail there may be one last weapon at your disposal. If your spam is commercial email (which it probably is) and originates within the EC (which it probably doesn’t), it is covered by the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 and you can make an online complaint at this website – just click on “How to Complain”. The site also contains details of past adjudications made in cases of direct email marketing and the various wrists which have been slapped as a result.