Duck That Spam

In the last 20 weeks, every tech or non-tech publication contained at least one news item or article about spam, saying how bad it is, how George Bush government will stop it by passing laws against it and so on.

Let’s face it! Spam is not going away no matter how many laws you pass against it. Stopping spam is far more difficult than carpet bombing a few countries. It costs almost nothing to send a million e-mails, and is enormously profitable-even if only 10 people responds, and by a University Diploma, a weight loss product, or accept money from wife of ex-president of some African country. Until people on Internet become more alert and savvy, spam is going to become a major business, and a major nuisance.

Most spam e-mails originate from China and some Eastern bloc countries. So, even if spam is outlawed in one country, your e-mail box will still overflow with spam originating from other countries. The rate it which spam is increasing, one or two sender countries dropping out won’t change the scene much.

Now, since we can’t stop spam, we can at least try to duck it. There are few ways to do it. One very popular, but not very effective way, is to use anti-spam software such as e-mail washer. This software is free and very good at detecting spam in mail box. It deletes spam before you download any e-mails and bounces all spam to the sender in order to appear as invalid e-mail address, and hope that the spammers will remove your address from their mailing list. If your e-mail address is not critical you can just create new e-mail account every few months and inform every one of the change.

One can start a strategy where if he can’t completely stop spams, he can at least reduce it to manageable level. The older your e-mail, the more important it is to you, and more spams it attracts. So if you are someone who needs e-mails for your work, then you should allocate some money every year for e-mail-just as you do for mobile phones, faxes, or ISP charges. You should sign-up for a domain name, which now costs as low as $7 to $13 per year and by e-mail hosting-20MB or more-it’s not so expensive. Usually the hosting company will create a master account and you can create a multiple POP3 accounts or aliases for as little as Rs. 300/- to Rs. 1300/- a year. If you don’t want to create multiple POP3 accounts, create just one main account, it can be called as ab@yourdomain.com. Don’t give this address to any one. Now create few aliases of it; how many depends solely on how many different categories you can sort your incoming mails into-for example create yourfirstname@yourdomain.com for all your personal contacts. Ask your friend not to submit this e-mail address to any websites which may offer them goodies in exchange for a friends e-mail address.

Create an alias-bank@yourdomain.com or abcbank@yourdomain.com- and use it for banking. Create a separate alias for every e-mail news letters you subscribe to and so on.

You can even create spam@yourdomain.com just for those websites which insists on your registering with them before you can use their services. Then you won’t have to bother checking these mails, as it will be full of mails and offers. Once done, create different folders in your e-mail software and use message rules to route incoming mails to respective folders depending on the address To/Cc field of incoming mails.

Now you are not at the mercy of spammers. If one of the above aliases receives any spam, you can just disable it by adding it to ‘nobody’ list, and all mails to this alias will start bouncing. Also, if you get spam at bank@yourdomain.com you can get that your bank is leaking, selling or renting your e-mail address. You may add this address to ‘nobody’ list, and inform the bank that you don’t wish to receive any communication by e-mail any more, or even taking your business elsewhere.

This strategy keeps your option open and lets you minimize spam, which you can’t do with free e-mail address. We also know that dot com portals can crash and thus, so can your free e-mail address. But your domain name protects you from such an uncertainty.