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 Category :: Spam |
Author :: Telian Adlam  |
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| Article Title :: Fighting the SPAM War |
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It is reported that 60%+ of internet traffic on mail servers are
spam messages. If you run a website, you can be sure that you
are (or will be over time) receiving a tremendous amount of
unsolicited email messages. If you haven’t started a website
yet, remember that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of
cure. There are safeguards you can use to minimize the number of
unwanted messages you receive.
WHOIS data: When you register a domain name, you are required to
provide contact information for the WHOIS database, which can
later be harvested by spammers for e-mail addresses. To protect
yourself from such unscrupulous people, I suggest using a dummy
account with a free email provider such as Yahoo or Hotmail
(don’t forget to check it at least once a month) - if you’ve
already registered your site and have listed your primary email
address in the WHOIS contact information, it is highly
recommended that you update the information with a new dummy
email address. Your host and registrar will have your primary
email address on file - you simply need to remember to keep your
information with them up to date. If this seems like too much
work for you, you can always use a WHOIS privacy service such as
the WhoisGuard service provided by www.namecheap.com ($4.88 -
which is a great value).
Your web pages: One of the first things I do when creating a
website is create a contact form with the email address embedded
in the mailer script such as PHP or ASP. Why? There is a lot of
software floating around out there designed solely to crawl
website harvesting them for valid email addresses (some will
even ignore the robots.txt file completely). Once you’ve created
your forms, you can then begin to include your email addresses
in your web pages for those who wish to email you directly from
their email clients - you can write your email address as
yourname[at]yourdomain.com and instead of using the ‘mailto:’
link - hyperlink it to your contact form. You may also include a
note for your visitors to replace the [at] with the @ sign. Make
sure you remember to do this with all the email addresses within
your site.
Newsgroups/forums/subscriptions: It’s a hard pill to swallow,
but these areas are not safe from email harvesting either and
even worse, some newsletter publishers don’t even adhere to
their own privacy policies (very rare, but it does happen). Be
careful where you post your email address and don’t make it a
habit to sign up with every forum you should come across. Make
sure you find the information useful to you and that you trust
the website first. For extra protection, use a an email address
other than your primary one for all your subscriptions (ex:
subscriptions@yourdomain.com). If you wish to post an email
address in the forums for the readers to contact you, try to use
the format described in the previous section with a note to
replace [at] with @ and hyperlink it to the contact form on your
website.
Unrouted email messages: An unrouted email message is a message
addressed to an email with your domain name that does not exist
- i.e. admin@yourdomain.com, only you never created an
admin@yourdomain.com account. The default setting is to have
these messages delivered to the root email account. Many
webmasters don’t realize this and the webmail for the root
account never gets checked - I came across an account with 75
pages of unrouted email messages (roughly 14,000 messages) and
taking up about 15MB of their of webspace. Believe it or not,
some spam software is designed to create plausible names (i.e.
admin, contact, customerservice, webmaster, abuse, etc.
@yourdomain.com) and just go for broke and hope the account
exists.
If you are using CPanel, you can check your default email
account by clicking on the “webmail” icon from your control
panel home page. You can also set what your unrouted messages
will do by clicking on the “mail” icon and selecting “default
address", then “set default address” - you can then choose to
blackhole unrouted messages (just let them disappear into
cyberspace - my personal favorite), fail messages (bounce them
back to sender) or you can specify an email address you want
them forwarded to. If you are afraid someone simply misspelled
your email address and you want to sift through the unrouted
messages, set up an email account specifically for them (ex:
unrouted@yourdomain.com) and remember to check it every week or
so.
SPAM filters: I consider spam filters to be a final line of
defense if all others fail. Currently, I use Mozilla Thunderbird
as my email application and it comes with a built in spam filter
which can be trained to catch unsolicited email. There are also
many other SPAM filter software out there for email clients such
as Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, etc. which are worth a
look. To find out more information on the available spam
filters, check out www.spamfighter.com (for Outlook and Outlook
Express - free) or do a quick google search for “free anti spam
software” for your platform.
A special note for AOL users: While I have nothing against AOL
and they are trying very hard to combat spam, they are slowly,
but surely losing the battle. I’ve had two email accounts opened
with them, and before I even had a chance to sign up for
anything or even tell my family about it - I received spam. I do
not know why they are so prone to spam, but something tells me
it has a lot to do with their member directory. My advice, get
another email address - just remember to check your AOL email
every once in a while to delete the messages. I’ve also noticed
that a lot of other subscription services are declining to email
AOL users due to their new “report spam” button being far too
close to the delete button and webmasters of legitimate email
lists are getting warnings from their ISPs.
In closing, I have managed to keep my current primary email spam
free (literally) for over a year using these methods, and before
that I kept my primary email address spam free for just over
two. I will plainly admit that I have no sympathy for spammers,
and I make sure to hunt down anyone who sends me spam and report
them until their site is either shut down or their ISP is added
to a block list.
If you want to learn more on fighting this spam war, there are
many valuable resources online such as www.spamhaus.org which
hosts a blacklist of known spammers and www.spamcon.org which
has a wealth of information on protecting yourself against spam.
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