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Reducing Junk Mail Or
SPAM
November
21, 2000
Junk Mail or SPAM
Spammers, those people that send you junk mail on just about every subject, are becoming more aggressive than ever. They believe it is their right to send their mail to you whenever they please. Listed below are some helpful suggestions on this subject.
1. Don't use your ISP address when signing Guest Books. An example would be if I used AOL as my Internet Service Provider and my email address was myname@aol.com. By getting a free web based email account I would sign guest books using the address of the service I signed up for such as myname@yahoo.com. Open up a FREE email account and use that address when signing guest books and requesting information to keep the unwanted email out of your home mail box.
2. Shield your address. It is simple to use when posting to a message board to a public domain area on the Internet. Instead of signing your name as myname@hotmail.com use instead myname@NOSPAMhotmail.com. Anyone wanting to write you can figure out to send you personal reply they have to take the "NOSPAM" out of the address!
3. Shield your address on your web site. Spamers also get your address from your web site. Use a form on your site for replies and comments instead of your email address. You can get these FREE from a number of sites. Two sites that offer them are http://www.response-o-matic.com/ and http://www.bravenet.com
4. Don't reply to the "Remove Me From This List" addresses in spam messages. C/Net has long and often said that when you reply to one of these "remove me" addresses you are in fact telling the sender that he/she has a valid email address in which to send more spam.
5. If the message is one that you just can't take and it comes often you can attempt to remove yourself by writing to the ISP that is providing the spamer a mail address from which to send messages. An example would be that you receive a message from get-rich-quick@yahoo.com You can forward the message to the web master of the site. Using the same example the address to forward the message to would be webmaster@yahoo.com. If you have the option forward the message as an attachment to allow the webmaster to view the headers in the message.
If the spam message has a return address such as joet@123india.com don't even bother doing this. The sender is hiding his address and there most likely is no "123india.com" out there on the Internet.
6. This last one is my own personal request to every one reading this. If you get a spam message from a sender like grandma@myhomeis.com or grandpa@localisp.com the chance is that someone has hacked into their mail account and using it to send out spam messages. Also, some viruses use the address book of a user to send out spam messages unknown to the owner. If you have to do anything in these cases just drop them a pleasant message to alert them to the fact that they have a problem with their email account.
Oh yes, if you send them a message use your FREE web based email service to do it!
bravenet.com