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According to Scott McAdams, OMA Public
Affair
s and Communications
Department (www.oma.org):
“Studies show unsolicited or “junk” e-mail,
known as spam, accounts for roughly half of all
e-mail messages received.
Although once regarded as little more than a
nuisance, the prevalence of spam has increased
to the point where many users have begun to
express a general lack of confidence in the
effectiveness of e-mail transmissions, and
increased concern over the spread of computer
viruses via unsolicited messages.”
In 2003, President Bush signed the “Can Spam”
bill, in December of 2003 which is the first
national standards around bulk unsolicited
commercial e-mail. The bill, approved by the
Senate by a vote of 97 to 0, prohibits senders
of unsolicited commercial e-mail from using
false return addresses to disguise their
identity (spoofing) and the use of dictionaries
to generate such mailers. In addition, it
prohibits the use of misleading subject lines
and requires that emails include and opt-out
mechanism. The legislation also prohibits
senders from harvesting addresses off Web
sites. Violations constitute a misdemeanor
crime subject to up to one year in jail.
One major point that needs to be discussed
about this:
spam is now coming from other countries in
ever-greater numbers. These emails are harder
to fight, because they come from outside our
country’s laws and regulations. Because the
Internet opens borders and thinks globally,
these laws are fine and good, but do not stop
the problem.
So what do you do about
this?
Here are the top 5 Rules to do to protect from
spam.
Number 1:
Do what you can to avoid having your email
address out on the net.
There are products called “spam spiders” that
search the Internet for email addresses to send
email to. If you are interested, do a search on
“spam spider” and you will be amazed at what
you get back. Interestingly, there is a site,
WebPoison.org, which is an open source project
geared to fight Internet "spambots" and "spam
spiders", by giving them bogus HTML web pages,
which contain bogus email addresses
A couple suggestions for you: a) use form
emails, which can hide addresses or also b) use
addresses like sales@company.com instead of
your full address to help battle the problem.
c) There are also programs that encode your
email, like jsGuard, which encodes your email
address on web pages so that while spam spiders
find it difficult or impossible to read your
email address.
Number 2:
Get spam blocking software. There are many
programs out there for this. (go to www.cloudmark.com
or www.mailwasher.net for
example). You may also buy a professional
version. Whatever you do, get the software.
It will save you time. The software is not
foolproof, but they really do help. You
usually have to do some manual set up to
block certain types of email.
Number 3:
Use the multiple email address approach.
There are a lot of free email addresses to be
had. If you must subscribe to newsletters, then
have a “back-up” email address. It would be
like giving your sell phone number to your best
friends and the business number to everyone
else.
Number 4:
Attachments from people you don’t know are BAD,
BAD, BAD.
A common problem with spam is that they have
attachments and attachments can have viruses.
Corporations often have filters that don’t let
such things pass to you. Personal email is far
more “open country” for spamers. General rule
of thumb: if you do not know who is sending you
something, DO NOT OPEN THE ATTACHMENT.
Secondly, look for services that offer
filtering. Firewall vendors offer this type of
service as well.
Number 5:
Email services now have “bulk-mail” baskets. If
what you use currently does not support this,
think about moving to a new vender. The concept
is simple. If you know someone, they can send
you emails. If you don’t know them, put them in
the bulk email pile and then “choose” to allow
them into your circle. Spam Blocking software
has this concept as well, but having extra
layers seems critical these days, so it is
worth looking into.
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