from Don Alexander

Who Cooked This!? (How did it all start?)

The modern meaning of the word “spam” has nothing to do with spiced ham. In the early 1990’s, a skit by British comedy group Monty Python led to the word’s common usage. “The SPAM Skit” follows a couple struggling to order dinner from a menu consisting entirely of Hormel’s canned ham.

Repetition is key to the skit’s hilarity. The actors cram the word “SPAM” into the 2.5 minute skit more than 104 times! This flood prompted Usenet readers to call unwanted newsgroup postings “spam.” The name stuck.

Spammers soon focused on e-mail, and the terminology moved with them. Today, the word has come out of technical obscurity. Now, “spam” is the common term for “Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail”, or “UCE.”

Why Does Bad Spam Happen to Good People?

Chances are, you’ve been spammed before. Somehow, your e-mail address has found it’s way into the hands of a spammer, and your inbox is suffering the consequences. How does this happen? There are several possibilities.

Backstabbing Businesses

Businesses often keep lists of their customers’ e-mail addresses. This is a completely legitimate practice and, usually, nothing bad comes of it. Sometimes though, the temptation to make a quick buck is too great, and these lists are sold or rented to outside advertisers. The result? A lot of unsolicited e-mail, and a serious breach of trust.

Random Address Generation

Computer programs called random address generators simply “guess” e-mail addresses. Over 100 million hotmail addresses exist – howhard could it be to guess some of them? Unfortunately for many unsuspecting netizens – not too hard. Many spammers also guess at

“standard” addresses, like “support@yourdomain.com”,

“info@yourdomain.com”, and “billing@yourdomain.com.”

Web Spiders

Today’s most insidious list-gathering tools are web spiders. All of the major search engines spider the web, saving information about each page. Spammers use tools that also spider the web, but save any e-mail address they come across. Your personal web page lists your e-mail address? Prepare for an onslaught!

Chat Room Harvesting

ISP’s offer vastly popular chat rooms where users are known only by their screen names. Of course, spammers know that your screen name is the first part of your e-mail address. Why waste time guessing e-mail addresses when a few hours of lurking in a chat room can net a list of actively-used addresses?

The Poor Man’s Bad Marketing Idea

It didn’t work for the phone companies, and it won’t work for e-mail marketers. But, some spammers still keep their own friends-and-family-style e-mail lists. Compiled from the addresses of other known spammers, and people or businesses that the owner has come across in the past, these lists are still illegitimate. Why? Only you can give someone permission to send you e-mail. A friend-of-a-friend’s permission won’t cut it.

Stop The Flood to Your Inbox

Already drowning in spam? Try using your e-mail client’s filters – many provide a way to block specific e-mail addresses. Each time you’re spammed, block the sender’s address. Spammers skip from address to address, and you may be on many lists, but this method will at least slow the flow.

Also, use more than one e-mail address, and keep one “clean.” Many netizens find that this technique turns the spam flood into a trickle. Use one address for only spam-safe activities like e-mailing your friends, or signing on with trustworthy businesses. Never use your clean address on the web! Get a free address to use on the web and in chat rooms.

If nothing else helps, consider changing screen names, or opening an entirely new e-mail account. When you do, you’ll start with a clean, spam-free slate. This time, protect your e-mail address!

Stay Off Spammed Lists in the Future

Want to surf the web without getting sucked into the spam-flood? Prevention is your best policy. Don’t use an easy-to-guess e-mail address. Keep your address clean by not using it for spam-centric activities. Don’t post it on any web pages, and don’t use it in chat rooms or newsgroups.

Before giving your clean e-mail address to a business, check the company out. Are sections of its user agreement dedicated to anti-spam rules? Does a privacy policy explain exactly what will be done with your address? The most considerate companies also post an anti-spam policy written in plain English, so you can be absolutely sure of what you’re getting into.

Think You’re Not a Spammer? Be Sure.

Many a first-time marketer has inadvertently spammed his audience. The first several hundred complaints and some nasty phone messages usually stop him in his tracks. But by then, the spammer may be faced with cleanup bills from his ISP, and a bad reputation that it’s not easy to overcome.

The best way to avoid this situation is to have a clear understanding of what spam is: If anyone who receives your mass e-mails did not specifically ask to hear from you, then you are spamming them.

Stick with your gut. Don’t buy a million addresses for $10, no matter how much the seller swears by them! If something sounds fishy, just say no. You’ll save yourself a lot in the end.

The Final Blow

The online world is turning the tide on spam. In the end, people will stop sending spam because it stops working. Do your part: never buy from a spammer. When your business seeks out technology companies with which to work, only choose those with a staunch anti-spam stance.

Spam has a long history in both the food and e-mail sectors. This year, Hormel Foods opened a real-world museum dedicated to SPAM. While the museum does feature the Monty Python SPAM Skit, there’s no word yet on an unsolicited commercial e-mail exhibit. But, if all upstanding netizens work together, Hormel’s ham in a can will far outlive the Internet plague that is UCE.

from Nicolaas Theron

You may imagine a world wide web where there is no more spam. That would be wonderful. However, the reality is that the spamming operations of a relatively small number of internet users result in the massive amounts of spam that are being sent on a daily basis. Sad, but true. It takes only one fly in your soup to make you complain to the waiter.

If you want to be free of spam, you should at least use some kind of spam filter for your computer. A spam blocker is a software application that scans and orders your incoming e-mail messages and attempts to filter out unwanted messages. A spam blocker is normally not 100% effective, but it takes a lot of the manual work in reading through and deleting unsolicited e-mails off your hands.

There are numerous free anti spam software that you may consider using. This can help you to clean up your inbox by removing junk mail easily. You may do a search engine search for the keyphrase ‘free anti spam’ and review each of the results until you find a free spam blocker software you like.

An example of a free spam blocker is POPfile. This is a good e-mail POP and NNTP proxy that filters out junk mail while ordering your normal mail.

It is important that you learn the basics concerning how to stop spam. Be sure to install and use a spam filter for all your e-mail addresses. This will help you get closer to no more spam in your inbox.

You probably already know that spam is unwanted, but is it illegal? A big problem with spam law is that the world wide web has grown so quickly. Spam law has been lagging behind and is still a bit confused about what is considered to be spam and what is not. Just remember that junk mail is illegal when unsolicited as well as sent in bulk.

Email spam wastes a lot of time and inbox space. This is true for individuals as well as big companies. Companies and individuals want to deal with junk mail safely and easily. This has created a big need for effective anti-spam software.

Stopping spam is proving to be difficult. If the anti spam law of one country makes it too difficult to work there, the spam gangs simply relocate to a different country with a weaker spam law.

You may need a spam filter if you desire to be free of spam mail. Spam blocker software blocks messages it decides is junk mail and keeps them from appearing in your inbox. It may accidentally block messages you wanted to read, but on the whole it is quite useful.

You can help the fight to eliminate spam by using a spam filter or complaining to your internet service provider about it. Also, never respond to any spam email you receive. Spammers are after all criminals engaging in unlawful behavior. This may help us towards a world wide web with no more spam.

from S. Kumar


Anyone who uses email knows what Spam is!

It’s annoying and time consuming to wade through volumes of fraud,con and obscene emails to filter out the really important ones. And I am sure you are affected by this menace in someform or other.

How do we reduce this intolerable amounts of junk?

Here are 5 Zero-Cost spam prevention tools to prevent junk cluttering your mail box. (You can access them all from a single source and the info is given at the end of this article.)

–* For the Average Email User *-

1. 0spam.com, – For the POP3 Mail user.

By far this is the easiest and effective solution for anyone with a POP3 email ID. For e.g. you@aol.com.

0Spam.com is a web based service that retrieves all your email for you and sends you only the emails from email ID’s that are pre-authenticated by you. This means, no one cansend you an email unless you give prior permission.

This service is very effective – let me tell you that.

2. SpamPal, – The Desktop Solution SpamPal is a program that sits between your email client and your mailbox, checking your email as you retrieve it.

Any email messages that SpamPal considers to be junk will be “tagged” with a special header; you simply configure your email client to filter anything with this header into a separate folder and your Spam won’t be mixed up with the rest of youremail anymore!

–* For the Website Owner *–

Posting your email address on your website is a sure way to attract junk. (e.g. support@yoursite.com)

In case you are not aware, there exists special software’s that harvest anything with an @ in between. This means, your posted emails are sitting ducks for an avalanche of junk.

1. Enkoder Form 6.0, – A Simple Solution for the Webmaster.

One way to protect yourself is to “encode” your address, The Enkoder Form will encrypt your Email address and convert it to a JavaScript,hiding it from Email harvesting robots which crawlthe web for exposed addresses.

Simply copy this JavaScript and paste it into your Web page where you want the email to appear.

2. Master SpamBot Buster, – A Thorough CGI Solution Master Spambot Buster stops robots harvesting email addresses from your web pages. But the script does more than that! It completely stops harvesting your email address from:

-Newsletters, -Newsgroup postings, -Discussion list postings, -Instant messages, -Print ads, -Or any other document

Instead of publishing your email address, you use the Master Spambot Buster method so that your email address is protectedfrom everywhere and from all documents.

This is a great software released by willmaster.com

3. NATATA Anti-Spam Encoder, – Desktop Solution

This program searches for email addresses either from all your web pages or a single page and encodes them all in minutes automatically. Its pure HTML encoding and no Java used.

You do not have to be technically savvy to use this one as it automatically inserts the codes into your web pages. In 2 minutes you can entirely encrypt all your web pages.

This is by far, the best software that I came across.

You may access all the 5 tools given above from here: Spam Prevention Tools

I hope, these resources will help you to reduce the junk clogging your mail box,