Junk Email Everyone receives unsolicited advertising-related email messages these days. In the computer industry, this junk mail is called "spam" or "UAE" (the latter stands for Unsolicited Advertising Email). Receiving "spam" is frustrating – the daily intrusion of reading and deciding what to do with it takes a lot of extra time most people just don't have. Many spams contain instructions on how to get removed from the sender’s email list. The instructions could tell you to hit reply and type remove, contact another email address to get removed, or go to a web page to fill out a form to get removed. Sometimes they direct you to call a phone number or send a fax to get removed. Any type of spam email messages that contain such removal instructions, we call "fishers". Their senders are fishing for valid people! When you follow the instructions in a fisher email, your name is sometimes placed on a premium list that contains all verified email addresses. The addresses are verified because everyone on the list performed the instructions that were in the original fisher mail, so the sender knows that somebody actually received the message! These premium lists sell for much more money that a list of unverified names. They are in hot demand, because people who send spam email receive more inquiries if they send to a list of verified people. Therefore, once you are on a circulating verified email list your spam email will increase dramatically. The resulting change is almost exponential - you will be quite surprised at how quickly the volume increases. Not all spam messages of this type are fisher emails, but it is almost impossible to tell the difference between a fisher and someone who has a system that truly allows you to avoid unsolicited email. A fisher circulated recently contained what looked like an email message from a Microsoft sales rep selling an upgrade to Office, but if you looked at it carefully it did not originate from microsoft.com even though that's what the sender's email address said! If you replied to this message, the reply went to an automatic database at a computer system in Alabama. That database had been sold throughout the world as a presumably premium list. The spammer put a phone number in the email that was actually the sales department at Microsoft! I imagine Microsoft ended up with a few sales from this caper! It was obvious that the only intention of the email was to collect valid email addresses in order to create a premium database. If you receive an email message from what looks like a valid company, such as Microsoft, it is best to call the originating company, and ask to have your address removed. Don't call the number listed in the email! Sometimes all that’s on the other end is a caller ID device hooked to a computer database or possibly a full voice mail box! If, instead, you call the originating company, they usually will want to inspect the email message you received. They may even be interested in trying to track down who sent it. Let them do the work! If the email is one they did, in fact, initiate, they will help you get removed from the list. The best way to combat spam, unfortunately, is to simply ignore it. Just hit the delete button and move on. Microsoft Outlook 98 has some built-in tools that can help reduce the amount of spam you receive. In addition, 3rd party products that work in conjunction with Outlook are available to help manage the amount of spam you receive, although they will never eliminate it. It is also possible to track down the Internet Service Provider (ISP) of the site that sent the original email and voice a complaint, but doing so is time consuming and usually ineffective, since ISP's don't have any more time to deal with this than you do. Make it a habit to simply delete the spam you receive; you will probably receive less of it in the long run. In addition, don't add yourself to electronic mailing lists or post anything to newsgroups on the Internet, since these are prime source materials for spammers. If you post email address links on your web site, limit the occurrences to as few as possible. Special "spiders" – software designed to automatically traverse the web site's page structure – can syphon off the email address links and drain them to a database to be sold to spammers. One vendor innocently posted the email address of each employee at his site; within a few weeks every employee in the company started receiving the same email spams! Every time you post your email address anywhere on the Internet, you are adding your own name to someone’s spam database! Spam email is a huge problem on the Internet. Even if the government enacted laws to restrict it, with the technology available today it’s very easy to spam the world, and hide yourself from discovery forever. Try to treat spam just like the junk mail each of us receives every day via the postal service. Toss it!
P.S. if this White Paper is reprinted, please don’t include my email address! :-)
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