Get Your Emails Organized, Part II : Fight Spam !

In the last few years the extent of Spam (unsolicited email) has
multiplied a hundred times. Have you taken measures to reduce
spam to a minimum ? If not, I will give you some hints how you
can fight this new evil of the information age .

Those annoying violators of your privacy are not worth your
valuable time...

Pseudo Excuses Of Spammers

Those guys hide their shameless behaviour after pseudo excuses
like "Thank you for your request" or "Re : More information" ,
"Thank you very much for your offer", "I saw your ad", "I've just
visited your website" etc. - so people could think "Mmmmmmh,
I'm not sure if I have NOT requested that stuff or perhaps he has
a real request" ; it could be a legal email, though...

Following the rules outlined in this article, you'll be able to free
more of your time for doing business again and not getting over-
whelmed by a flood of emails.

Use A Different Email Address For All Your Marketing Needs...

I'm almost certain that you will have more than just one email
address for your email needs . Or rather not ? Then you are
making a big mistake.....

Do you already have your own domain ? With your own website,
you will have included a lot of email POP-accounts which are just
perfect to fit your desire to be protected against spam . If you
don't have your own domain, you should order one ASAP or you
are not serious about marketing on the Internet....

You should at least set up the following e-mail accounts :

1.) E-mail for subscriptions to newsletters ONLY
-e.g. : ezines@domainname.com

2.) E-mail for private purposes (friends, relatives, colleagues)
-e.g. : firstname@yahoo.com , firstname@hotmail.com

3.) E-mail for public ads (public e-mail address )
- e.g. : ads1@domainname.com ---> This Is The Email
Address Where SPAM Goes To

4.) E-mail for outgoing ad messages (e.g. if you're the owner of
an FFA-page and you send confirmation e-mails; this would
be the "sender"-address) ------> This is the email address
where you have to deal with autoresponders/undeliverables/
and also SPAM

5.) E-mail for personal marketing contacts only (e.g. contact with
other newsletter publishers/JV-partners/affiliates etc. )
- e.g. : firstname@domainname.com

And additionally, if you publish an ezine, you'll need these :

6.) E-mail for article submissions
-e.g.: articles@domainname.com

7.) E-mail for advertisement info
-e.g.: ads@domainname.com or adinfo@domainname.com

Then you create new inboxes for each of these new email
accounts . The next step is to set up rules for filtering the
incoming emails into the right folders ( described in part I of
"Get your emails organized" ) .

With this very basic filtering system, you can categorize your in-
coming emails at a glance. You will also be able to delete all
spam mails you received with two clicks of your mouse .

The 3 Golden Rules Of Spam Reduction :

NEVER EVER use your private/subscription addresses/marke-
ting contacts email addresses for public purposes. Never leave
these addresses on websites and don't use them in your email
correspondences (except for validation purposes from ezines
you are subscribed to, e.g. to get your free ads) !

NEVER EVER post to FFA-pages (by the way, you won't get
any results from using them as these pages are hardly ever seen
by a human ....- Owning an FFA-page is something different) !

NEVER EVER reply to spammers (this is just a hint for them
that the email address is VALID !) !

And last but not least : I've come across a great resource that
fights spam with their own methods at :

http://www.monkeys.com/wpoison/

This is a cgi-script that fights spam by creating dynamic email-
addresses . The harvesting software collects that many email
addresses that a lot of them are just rubbish for the owner who
uses those methods .

Although you can reduce the amount of spam by adopting the
rules and habits I mentioned in this article, I am quite sure that
spammers will survive because not everybody knows how to
prevent or reduce spam and those intruders will find new
victims....
multiplied a hundred times. Have you taken measures to reduce
spam to a minimum ? If not, I will give you some hints how you
can fight this new evil of the information age .

Those annoying violators of your privacy are not worth your
valuable time...

Pseudo Excuses Of Spammers

Those guys hide their shameless behaviour after pseudo excuses
like "Thank you for your request" or "Re : More information" ,
"Thank you very much for your offer", "I saw your ad", "I've just
visited your website" etc. - so people could think "Mmmmmmh,
I'm not sure if I have NOT requested that stuff or perhaps he has
a real request" ; it could be a legal email, though...

Following the rules outlined in this article, you'll be able to free
more of your time for doing business again and not getting over-
whelmed by a flood of emails.

Use A Different Email Address For All Your Marketing Needs...

I'm almost certain that you will have more than just one email
address for your email needs . Or rather not ? Then you are
making a big mistake.....

Do you already have your own domain ? With your own website,
you will have included a lot of email POP-accounts which are just
perfect to fit your desire to be protected against spam . If you
don't have your own domain, you should order one ASAP or you
are not serious about marketing on the Internet....

You should at least set up the following e-mail accounts :

1.) E-mail for subscriptions to newsletters ONLY
-e.g. : ezines@domainname.com

2.) E-mail for private purposes (friends, relatives, colleagues)
-e.g. : firstname@yahoo.com , firstname@hotmail.com

3.) E-mail for public ads (public e-mail address )
- e.g. : ads1@domainname.com ---> This Is The Email
Address Where SPAM Goes To

4.) E-mail for outgoing ad messages (e.g. if you're the owner of
an FFA-page and you send confirmation e-mails; this would
be the "sender"-address) ------> This is the email address
where you have to deal with autoresponders/undeliverables/
and also SPAM

5.) E-mail for personal marketing contacts only (e.g. contact with
other newsletter publishers/JV-partners/affiliates etc. )
- e.g. : firstname@domainname.com

And additionally, if you publish an ezine, you'll need these :

6.) E-mail for article submissions
-e.g.: articles@domainname.com

7.) E-mail for advertisement info
-e.g.: ads@domainname.com or adinfo@domainname.com

Then you create new inboxes for each of these new email
accounts . The next step is to set up rules for filtering the
incoming emails into the right folders ( described in part I of
"Get your emails organized" ) .

With this very basic filtering system, you can categorize your in-
coming emails at a glance. You will also be able to delete all
spam mails you received with two clicks of your mouse .

The 3 Golden Rules Of Spam Reduction :

NEVER EVER use your private/subscription addresses/marke-
ting contacts email addresses for public purposes. Never leave
these addresses on websites and don't use them in your email
correspondences (except for validation purposes from ezines
you are subscribed to, e.g. to get your free ads) !

NEVER EVER post to FFA-pages (by the way, you won't get
any results from using them as these pages are hardly ever seen
by a human ....- Owning an FFA-page is something different) !

NEVER EVER reply to spammers (this is just a hint for them
that the email address is VALID !) !

And last but not least : I've come across a great resource that
fights spam with their own methods at :

http://www.monkeys.com/wpoison/

This is a cgi-script that fights spam by creating dynamic email-
addresses . The harvesting software collects that many email
addresses that a lot of them are just rubbish for the owner who
uses those methods .

Although you can reduce the amount of spam by adopting the
rules and habits I mentioned in this article, I am quite sure that
spammers will survive because not everybody knows how to
prevent or reduce spam and those intruders will find new
victims....

Article by Detlev Reimer. Feel free to use the article with these
bylines included. Detlev has just finished creating his first product,
a database program for Internet marketers which will help you to save
and organize e.g. your advertising, customer and contact data. For
further details, please visit : http://www.promobuddy.com/ . Sign up
for his newsletter at http://www.internetmarketing-success.com/ .

How Can I Stop Getting Spam?Sean Proske

A Tutorial for Webmasters
By Sean Proske
mailto:sproske@thewebhostcompany.com

Are you getting too much spam? We all are, but if
you're a webmaster the word spam takes on a whole
new meaning.

It's not uncommon for the luckiest of email
users to receive a dozen or so spam messages each
day, while those of us who aren't so fortunate
receive hundreds.

The casual home user tends to be more fortunate,
so this article is devoted to those of us with one
or more website because webmasters are getting hit
by spam ... and hit hard.

The reason ... a website doesn't do you much
good if you don't give potential customers a way
to contact you, and that normally means posting an
email address on your website, where it is
vulnerable to email address harvesting tools used
by spammers. Domain registration records are also
a common source used by spammers.

In order to conduct business online you now need
to sift through the endless barrage of offers for
herbal viagra, pornography, pyramid schemes, and
so on.

With such a large volume of spam to contend with,
it's likely you've lost sales due to missing
important emails that simply floated away in this
sea of spam. And there's no way to really
calculate the cost of that lost business. If
you've missed email then how can you ever know how
much business you've lost?

If you want to solve the problem, you need to be
proactive because the sad reality is that if you
do nothing, it will only get worse until finally
it reaches the point where your email account has
become totally and completely unmanageable.
Fortunately there are a few options available to
you.

--------------------------------------------------
Securing Your Domain Registration Against Spammers
--------------------------------------------------

First let's address the whois database, which is a
publicly accessible database in which your domain
registration record is listed ... and that
includes your email address. It's not uncommon
now for people to be spammed at a brand new email
address within hours of registering a new domain.

Go Daddy http://www.godaddy.com is a domain
registrar that now offers private domain
registrations. At the time of writing this
article, they are the only registrar who currently
offers this service. Hopefully in time, other
registrars will pick up on this idea and offer the
service too.

With a private domain registration, which costs
only a few dollars more than a regular
registration, your contact information including
your email address will not be publicly accessible
in the whois database.

That's guaranteed to cut down on spam quite
significantly as this very important source of
addresses that spammers use, will no longer
provide your address to them.

If you don't wish to obtain a private domain
registration, then there is another option that
will be equally effective. Set up a new email
address that you use only for the purpose of
providing registration information for your domain
name. You can easily scan email sent to that
address for messages from your registrar, and
delete the rest without having to read it.

--------------------------------------------------
Securing Your Website Against Spammers
--------------------------------------------------

The other major source, and by far the biggest
source of email addresses for spammers is of
course the mailto links on your own website.
Email address harvesting or extraction software as
it's known is cheap, easy to use, and readily
available ... and it's very effective. That
means there are a lot of spammers out there with
easy access to your email address.

Chances are hundreds or even thousands of spammers
using such software have already harvested your
address. And what can you do about this? You
need to provide a way for your customers to reach
you by email, or you'll lose business. There are
steps you can take to prevent your email address
from being harvested and used by spammers though,
while still providing legitimate visitors to your
site with a way to email you.

One solution is to make all the mailto links on
your site point to a form instead, which will
still provide a means for people to send you
email. Provided you use a CGI script that
doesn't require the address to be embedded
within the form itself, you can shield your
address from email address extractors.

If you don't want to require people to fill out
a form to email you from your website, then you
can get a little more creative. It is possible to
put a mailto link on your site that when clicked
will still launch the sender's email program,
and start a new message with your address in the
To field ... but without having to embed your
email address in the mailto link where spam
software can snatch it. Click below to see an
example of how it works.

http:/ hewebhostcompany.com/cgi-local/email.cgi

It looks like a normal URL, and there's clearly no
email address anywhere in the link, but when
clicked, instead of loading a web page in your
browser as you may have expected, your email
program opens up.

How's that possible you might ask? Simple. A
little magic with CGI using Perl or PHP will do
the trick. A free copy of a script that does this
is bundled with Postmaster Pro, available at
http://www.postmasterpro.com which is discussed
below.

--------------------------------------------------
What About Spammers Who Already Have My Address?
--------------------------------------------------

So far we've discussed a few fairly simple
techniques designed to prevent spammers from
obtaining your email address in the first place.
But, how do you deal with the spam you're
already getting? Your address is already out
there. The solution is to either block or filter.

For either, you'll need software. For blocking, I
recommend Postmaster Pro. If you prefer to filter
then Spam Assassin is highly recommended. Both
run on the server, so there is no need to download
spam before filtering it out. That's a huge time
saver if you're not yet on a high-speed
connection. It also makes it a bit less likely
you'll end up downloading a virus since email from
untrusted senders, i.e. spammers will be
significantly reduced.

------------------------------------------------
Spam Blocking Software
------------------------------------------------

Postmaster Pro which is available at
http://www.postmasterpro.com takes a novel
approach to blocking spam. It only allows email
to be delivered after people who've sent you
email have been placed on an approved sender list.
But the interesting thing is that people who send
you email can put themselves on your approved
list. This is done simply by clicking a link in
an email that automatically gets sent to them the
first time they send email to you, which is
perfect for those of us who don't know in
advance whom we should put on the approved list,
i.e. if you're running a business online. It
also makes building and maintaining such a list
very simple.

Given the fact that spammers normally use invalid
return addresses, and those who do use valid
return addresses seldom read email that's sent
there, let alone respond to it (they receive
thousands of failed delivery notifications,
complaints, remove requests, and autoresponder
messages every time they do a mailing) ... it's
a very effective technique with no chance of
blocking legitimate email, as is the case with
filtering.

--------------------------------------------------
Spam Filtering Software
--------------------------------------------------

For those who would prefer to filter ... Spam
Assassin is perhaps the best option. It is
available at http://www.spamassassin.org. Once
you have Spam Assassin installed, it will provide
you with very powerful and flexible filtering
tools. Spam Assassin is a mature product, having
been around for quite some time. If you're
going to filter, Spam Assassin is about as good as
it gets.

As with any filter though, you do run the risk of
missing legitimate email from time to time. There
really isn't a good way to tell how often this is
happening unless you want to read all the email
that gets filtered out, which negates the whole
point of filtering. If you set your filters
permissively enough though, you should be
reasonably safe. For the first month or so after
installing any filter, you should continue to read
every single email in order to make sure it isn't
set too restrictively to allow legitimate email
through.

By using the techniques mentioned in this article,
you can take back your mailbox, and dramatically
reduce, if not eliminate spam.

--------------------------------------------------
Sean Proske is the CEO and founding partner of
thewebhostcompany.com which has provided reliable
and affordable hosting since 1996.
http://www.thewebhostcompany.com
mailto:info@thewebhostcompany.com
--------------------------------------------------
2003 by Sean Proske

You have permission to publish this article
electronically or in print, in your Newsletter, on
your website, or in your E-Book, as long as the
author's Resource Box is included with the
article.
A Tutorial for Webmasters
By Sean Proske
mailto:sproske@thewebhostcompany.com

Are you getting too much spam? We all are, but if
you're a webmaster the word spam takes on a whole
new meaning.

It's not uncommon for the luckiest of email
users to receive a dozen or so spam messages each
day, while those of us who aren't so fortunate
receive hundreds.

The casual home user tends to be more fortunate,
so this article is devoted to those of us with one
or more website because webmasters are getting hit
by spam ... and hit hard.

The reason ... a website doesn't do you much
good if you don't give potential customers a way
to contact you, and that normally means posting an
email address on your website, where it is
vulnerable to email address harvesting tools used
by spammers. Domain registration records are also
a common source used by spammers.

In order to conduct business online you now need
to sift through the endless barrage of offers for
herbal viagra, pornography, pyramid schemes, and
so on.

With such a large volume of spam to contend with,
it's likely you've lost sales due to missing
important emails that simply floated away in this
sea of spam. And there's no way to really
calculate the cost of that lost business. If
you've missed email then how can you ever know how
much business you've lost?

If you want to solve the problem, you need to be
proactive because the sad reality is that if you
do nothing, it will only get worse until finally
it reaches the point where your email account has
become totally and completely unmanageable.
Fortunately there are a few options available to
you.

--------------------------------------------------
Securing Your Domain Registration Against Spammers
--------------------------------------------------

First let's address the whois database, which is a
publicly accessible database in which your domain
registration record is listed ... and that
includes your email address. It's not uncommon
now for people to be spammed at a brand new email
address within hours of registering a new domain.

Go Daddy http://www.godaddy.com is a domain
registrar that now offers private domain
registrations. At the time of writing this
article, they are the only registrar who currently
offers this service. Hopefully in time, other
registrars will pick up on this idea and offer the
service too.

With a private domain registration, which costs
only a few dollars more than a regular
registration, your contact information including
your email address will not be publicly accessible
in the whois database.

That's guaranteed to cut down on spam quite
significantly as this very important source of
addresses that spammers use, will no longer
provide your address to them.

If you don't wish to obtain a private domain
registration, then there is another option that
will be equally effective. Set up a new email
address that you use only for the purpose of
providing registration information for your domain
name. You can easily scan email sent to that
address for messages from your registrar, and
delete the rest without having to read it.

--------------------------------------------------
Securing Your Website Against Spammers
--------------------------------------------------

The other major source, and by far the biggest
source of email addresses for spammers is of
course the mailto links on your own website.
Email address harvesting or extraction software as
it's known is cheap, easy to use, and readily
available ... and it's very effective. That
means there are a lot of spammers out there with
easy access to your email address.

Chances are hundreds or even thousands of spammers
using such software have already harvested your
address. And what can you do about this? You
need to provide a way for your customers to reach
you by email, or you'll lose business. There are
steps you can take to prevent your email address
from being harvested and used by spammers though,
while still providing legitimate visitors to your
site with a way to email you.

One solution is to make all the mailto links on
your site point to a form instead, which will
still provide a means for people to send you
email. Provided you use a CGI script that
doesn't require the address to be embedded
within the form itself, you can shield your
address from email address extractors.

If you don't want to require people to fill out
a form to email you from your website, then you
can get a little more creative. It is possible to
put a mailto link on your site that when clicked
will still launch the sender's email program,
and start a new message with your address in the
To field ... but without having to embed your
email address in the mailto link where spam
software can snatch it. Click below to see an
example of how it works.

http:/ hewebhostcompany.com/cgi-local/email.cgi

It looks like a normal URL, and there's clearly no
email address anywhere in the link, but when
clicked, instead of loading a web page in your
browser as you may have expected, your email
program opens up.

How's that possible you might ask? Simple. A
little magic with CGI using Perl or PHP will do
the trick. A free copy of a script that does this
is bundled with Postmaster Pro, available at
http://www.postmasterpro.com which is discussed
below.

--------------------------------------------------
What About Spammers Who Already Have My Address?
--------------------------------------------------

So far we've discussed a few fairly simple
techniques designed to prevent spammers from
obtaining your email address in the first place.
But, how do you deal with the spam you're
already getting? Your address is already out
there. The solution is to either block or filter.

For either, you'll need software. For blocking, I
recommend Postmaster Pro. If you prefer to filter
then Spam Assassin is highly recommended. Both
run on the server, so there is no need to download
spam before filtering it out. That's a huge time
saver if you're not yet on a high-speed
connection. It also makes it a bit less likely
you'll end up downloading a virus since email from
untrusted senders, i.e. spammers will be
significantly reduced.

------------------------------------------------
Spam Blocking Software
------------------------------------------------

Postmaster Pro which is available at
http://www.postmasterpro.com takes a novel
approach to blocking spam. It only allows email
to be delivered after people who've sent you
email have been placed on an approved sender list.
But the interesting thing is that people who send
you email can put themselves on your approved
list. This is done simply by clicking a link in
an email that automatically gets sent to them the
first time they send email to you, which is
perfect for those of us who don't know in
advance whom we should put on the approved list,
i.e. if you're running a business online. It
also makes building and maintaining such a list
very simple.

Given the fact that spammers normally use invalid
return addresses, and those who do use valid
return addresses seldom read email that's sent
there, let alone respond to it (they receive
thousands of failed delivery notifications,
complaints, remove requests, and autoresponder
messages every time they do a mailing) ... it's
a very effective technique with no chance of
blocking legitimate email, as is the case with
filtering.

--------------------------------------------------
Spam Filtering Software
--------------------------------------------------

For those who would prefer to filter ... Spam
Assassin is perhaps the best option. It is
available at http://www.spamassassin.org. Once
you have Spam Assassin installed, it will provide
you with very powerful and flexible filtering
tools. Spam Assassin is a mature product, having
been around for quite some time. If you're
going to filter, Spam Assassin is about as good as
it gets.

As with any filter though, you do run the risk of
missing legitimate email from time to time. There
really isn't a good way to tell how often this is
happening unless you want to read all the email
that gets filtered out, which negates the whole
point of filtering. If you set your filters
permissively enough though, you should be
reasonably safe. For the first month or so after
installing any filter, you should continue to read
every single email in order to make sure it isn't
set too restrictively to allow legitimate email
through.

By using the techniques mentioned in this article,
you can take back your mailbox, and dramatically
reduce, if not eliminate spam.

--------------------------------------------------
Sean Proske is the CEO and founding partner of
thewebhostcompany.com which has provided reliable
and affordable hosting since 1996.
http://www.thewebhostcompany.com
mailto:info@thewebhostcompany.com
--------------------------------------------------
2003 by Sean Proske

You have permission to publish this article
electronically or in print, in your Newsletter, on
your website, or in your E-Book, as long as the
author's Resource Box is included with the
article.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sean Proske is the CEO and founding partner of
thewebhostcompany.com which has provided reliable
and affordable hosting since 1996.
http://www.thewebhostcompany.com
mailto:info@thewebhostcompany.com

Small Business Q & A: Beware Of Spam Withdrawals

Q: I am so sick of all the spam that is sent to my business
email address. I spend an hour every morning just trying to sort
out the good email from the bad. I know I could just delete it
all, but I'm afraid I'll accidentally delete email that might
be important to my business. Short of unplugging my computer,
what's the best solution for dealing with spam?

A: I feel your pain. I, too, miss the good old days when
the only time you'd spend an hour dealing with spam was trying
to pry it out of the can.

Due to the nature of my business, I get a lot of unwanted email.
I've been working on the Internet since 1995 and my email
address has been publicly exposed for most of that time, so I am
a spammer's delight. It is no exaggeration to say that I used
to receive more than 400 email messages a day. Out of those 400
messages about 10% were from people I knew, 10% were from people
I needed to know, and the rest were from people that I would
like to track down and field dress with a very dull knife.

Spammers, they are called the scourge of the Internet the
digital kin of the lowly telemarketer and dreaded junk mailer.

After listening to me complain about spam for months, my lead
engineer burst into my office a few weeks ago and announced,
"I've solved our spam problem! I've installed a spam filter
on our server that will prevent spam from getting through."

Great, I thought, now I can find something new to complain about.

I wondered what I would do with the extra two hours a day this
wonderful spam filter would give me. My joy quickly waned when
within a day my email went from 400 to 40. It was the saddest
day of my life. Sitting there staring at my empty email box I
suddenly felt very alone. At that moment I realized that not
only had I come to expect the morning deluge of email, but I
had come to find comfort in it. The spammers had become my
friends. They wanted me to get rich quick and brighten my smile.
They wanted to enhance my love life with generic Viagra and give
me great deals on miniature cameras, low interest loans,
waterfront property, and more. And the sheer number of folks
concerned about the abundance (or lack thereof) of my anatomy
was incredibly heart warming.

And the ladies that sent me email were so nice. They were
worried that I was lonely and offered to cure my loneliness if
only I gave them a credit card number. How sweet is that?

After a few days the withdrawal symptoms ceased and I was happy
to be free of the majority of the spam, though to this day I'm
afraid that I might be missing out on something grand.

You and I are not alone, Anna. According to a recent study by
eMarketer, the average Internet email user now receives 81
emails a day, and nearly one quarter of them are spam. Spam
now makes up more than 40% of all email and costs U.S. companies
more than $10 billion annually. Seventy-six billion unsolicited
e-mail messages will be delivered in 2003.

So how do spammers get your email address in the first place?
It's easier than you might think. While some spam comes as a
result of online purchases (yes, there are companies that will
sell your email address no matter what their privacy policy
says), that's just one of the ways spammers get you in their
sites.

Spammers use "spider software" to crawl the web and harvest
email address, so if you have a personal or company website
that has your email posted on it, sooner or later a spam spider
is going to grab your address and add it to the mill. Likewise
when you sign up to take online surveys or receive email
newsletters, you are potentially exposing yourself to spammers.

How can you reduce the amount of spam you get? Many people
think that you can't fight spam, so you should just accept it
and move on. In other words, you can not fight the Borg, so
smile and be assimilated into the fold. While spam is hard to
eliminate, there are things you can do to lessen the amount of
spam you receive and it's impact on your daily business life.

First, stop clicking on the "unsubscribe" links at the bottom of
spam emails. While some of the links are valid and will get you
removed from spammer's lists, other are actually there just to
let the spammer know that your address is valid. Click the link
to unsubscribe and you might actually see the amount of spam you
receive increase.

Second, it's a good idea to have at least two e-mail addresses.
Use one for personal or business use, and the other for surveys
and online purchases.

Third, consider installing a spam blocking software on your
computer or company network. There are a variety of spam
blocking applications on the market that range in price from
free to a hundred bucks. Though none of them will completely
eliminate spam, they can greatly reduce the volume you receive.
Search the Web for "spam filter" and investigate the ones that
you feel are right for you.

Your Internet Service Provider should also offer an anti-spam
application, but be careful how you use it. I have a client who
recently increased the sensitivity of their ISP spam blocker to
the point that nothing was getting delivered to their company
email accounts, including their own company newsletter. They
had effectively built an email brick wall that stopped the spam
and everything else. Not a good idea.

Before investing in a commercial spam blocker you might also try
adjusting the email filtering settings in your email software.
Microsoft Outlook, for example, lets you set rules for handling
incoming mail. The same is true with Outlook Express, Eudora,
and Apple's Mail OSX. Each have built-in filtering features
that can help eliminate unwanted email by parameters you set.

One thing to remember is that if spam didn't work, it would
quickly go away. In other words, if spammers weren't profiting
from sending unwanted emails they would go do something else.

Probably become a telemarketer or credit card debt collector.

Whether you use a commercial product or rely on your existing
email software to filter out spam, just be careful that you
don't batten down the hatches so tight that you no longer
receive any email at all.

Here's to your success!

Tim Knox
tim@dropshipwholesale.net
For information on starting your own online or eBay business,
visit http://www.dropshipwholesale.net
email address. I spend an hour every morning just trying to sort
out the good email from the bad. I know I could just delete it
all, but I'm afraid I'll accidentally delete email that might
be important to my business. Short of unplugging my computer,
what's the best solution for dealing with spam?

A: I feel your pain. I, too, miss the good old days when
the only time you'd spend an hour dealing with spam was trying
to pry it out of the can.

Due to the nature of my business, I get a lot of unwanted email.
I've been working on the Internet since 1995 and my email
address has been publicly exposed for most of that time, so I am
a spammer's delight. It is no exaggeration to say that I used
to receive more than 400 email messages a day. Out of those 400
messages about 10% were from people I knew, 10% were from people
I needed to know, and the rest were from people that I would
like to track down and field dress with a very dull knife.

Spammers, they are called the scourge of the Internet the
digital kin of the lowly telemarketer and dreaded junk mailer.

After listening to me complain about spam for months, my lead
engineer burst into my office a few weeks ago and announced,
"I've solved our spam problem! I've installed a spam filter
on our server that will prevent spam from getting through."

Great, I thought, now I can find something new to complain about.

I wondered what I would do with the extra two hours a day this
wonderful spam filter would give me. My joy quickly waned when
within a day my email went from 400 to 40. It was the saddest
day of my life. Sitting there staring at my empty email box I
suddenly felt very alone. At that moment I realized that not
only had I come to expect the morning deluge of email, but I
had come to find comfort in it. The spammers had become my
friends. They wanted me to get rich quick and brighten my smile.
They wanted to enhance my love life with generic Viagra and give
me great deals on miniature cameras, low interest loans,
waterfront property, and more. And the sheer number of folks
concerned about the abundance (or lack thereof) of my anatomy
was incredibly heart warming.

And the ladies that sent me email were so nice. They were
worried that I was lonely and offered to cure my loneliness if
only I gave them a credit card number. How sweet is that?

After a few days the withdrawal symptoms ceased and I was happy
to be free of the majority of the spam, though to this day I'm
afraid that I might be missing out on something grand.

You and I are not alone, Anna. According to a recent study by
eMarketer, the average Internet email user now receives 81
emails a day, and nearly one quarter of them are spam. Spam
now makes up more than 40% of all email and costs U.S. companies
more than $10 billion annually. Seventy-six billion unsolicited
e-mail messages will be delivered in 2003.

So how do spammers get your email address in the first place?
It's easier than you might think. While some spam comes as a
result of online purchases (yes, there are companies that will
sell your email address no matter what their privacy policy
says), that's just one of the ways spammers get you in their
sites.

Spammers use "spider software" to crawl the web and harvest
email address, so if you have a personal or company website
that has your email posted on it, sooner or later a spam spider
is going to grab your address and add it to the mill. Likewise
when you sign up to take online surveys or receive email
newsletters, you are potentially exposing yourself to spammers.

How can you reduce the amount of spam you get? Many people
think that you can't fight spam, so you should just accept it
and move on. In other words, you can not fight the Borg, so
smile and be assimilated into the fold. While spam is hard to
eliminate, there are things you can do to lessen the amount of
spam you receive and it's impact on your daily business life.

First, stop clicking on the "unsubscribe" links at the bottom of
spam emails. While some of the links are valid and will get you
removed from spammer's lists, other are actually there just to
let the spammer know that your address is valid. Click the link
to unsubscribe and you might actually see the amount of spam you
receive increase.

Second, it's a good idea to have at least two e-mail addresses.
Use one for personal or business use, and the other for surveys
and online purchases.

Third, consider installing a spam blocking software on your
computer or company network. There are a variety of spam
blocking applications on the market that range in price from
free to a hundred bucks. Though none of them will completely
eliminate spam, they can greatly reduce the volume you receive.
Search the Web for "spam filter" and investigate the ones that
you feel are right for you.

Your Internet Service Provider should also offer an anti-spam
application, but be careful how you use it. I have a client who
recently increased the sensitivity of their ISP spam blocker to
the point that nothing was getting delivered to their company
email accounts, including their own company newsletter. They
had effectively built an email brick wall that stopped the spam
and everything else. Not a good idea.

Before investing in a commercial spam blocker you might also try
adjusting the email filtering settings in your email software.
Microsoft Outlook, for example, lets you set rules for handling
incoming mail. The same is true with Outlook Express, Eudora,
and Apple's Mail OSX. Each have built-in filtering features
that can help eliminate unwanted email by parameters you set.

One thing to remember is that if spam didn't work, it would
quickly go away. In other words, if spammers weren't profiting
from sending unwanted emails they would go do something else.

Probably become a telemarketer or credit card debt collector.

Whether you use a commercial product or rely on your existing
email software to filter out spam, just be careful that you
don't batten down the hatches so tight that you no longer
receive any email at all.

Here's to your success!

Tim Knox
tim@dropshipwholesale.net
For information on starting your own online or eBay business,
visit http://www.dropshipwholesale.net

Tim Knox as the president and CEO of two successful technology
companies: B2Secure Inc., a Web-based hiring management software
company; and Digital Graphiti Inc., a software development company.
Tim is also the founder of dropshipwholesale.net, an ebusiness
dedicated to the success of online entrepreneurs.
http://www.dropshipwholesale.net
http://www.smallbusinessqa.com

Top 7 tips for reducing spam

You may publish this article, free of charge in your e-zine
or any publication.

The article must be published in its entirety, unedited,
without any changes to its content. You may format the
article to fit your requirements.

The resource box at the end of this article must be
included with the article.

A courtsey copy of your ezine or publication in which the
article is published will be appreciated.
email: article@business-development-strategies.com

Format 60 CPL. Word count 812 Copyright Patrick Silva, 2004

Top 7 tips for reducing spam.

Spam, also known as unsolicited emails is the scurge of the
Internet. Like annoying phone calls from telemarketers
trying to sell you something while you are having dinner,
spam is irretating, frustrating and takes up a lot of your
valuable time.

Spammers use special software called Email Harvesting
Robots to scour the Internet 24/7, 365 days a year to find
and gather email addresses.

These Robots look for the '@' symbol which is the symbol
used in all email addresses. Then they extract your email
address, without your knowledge or permission and add it
to their email address data base.

If you post your email address on your web site, your
e-zine, forums, chat rooms or anywhere on the Internet,
you are laying yourself wide open to email harvesting
robots and spammers.

Some unscrupulous scum send viruses through spam email that
can mess up or distroy your computer. Some of the viruses
that the spammers email you hide inside your system files,
replicate themselves and mail themselves to everyone in
your address book.

Spam is becoming such a huge problem that the US Government
is passing legislation to regulate unsolicited emails.
However the US Government has no control over spam that
originates in other countries.

Therefore, spam is a scurge that governments might not be
able to control.

But we, as individuals can protect ourselves by doing
whatever we can to reduce the amount of spam we receive.
Here are seven tips that will help you reduce spam.

1) NEVER EVER respond or reply to a spam email no matter
how tempting, curious or annoying the message is. Keep
your cool. If you do reply, the spammer will know that
your email address is an active one. Do not open any
attachments. Just delete the spam.

2) Never click on the 'unsubscribe' link in a spam email.
If you do, again the spammer will know that your email
address is active. He will sell your email address to
other spammers. The spam you receive will double or
tripple.

3) Protect your primary email address. This is the one that
you get from your Internet Service Provider (ISP.) Do
not give out your primary email address to anyone unless
you trust them. If you want to subscribe to a newsleter
with your primary email address, make sure that you read
the terms of use and their privacy policy.

4) Have an 'All Purpose' email address like a Yahoo or a
Hotmail email address to post in forums, chat rooms etc.
The email you receive to these addresses are web-based.
You can read your Yahoo or Hotmail email messages on your
Yahoo or Hotmail account on their web site without
downloading them into your computer. You can delete all
the spam right from those web sites.

5) If you have your own web site and have to give out your
email address for people to contact you, you can 'cloak'
your email address by substituting the HTML code for the
'@' symbol. This way, the email harvesting robots will
not be able to extract your email address from your
web site.

When you cloak your email address, you can include an
active email link such as 'Contact me' or 'Email me.'
When your contact clicks on the active email link, her
email program will open with your email address in the
'To' box.

6) Never ever buy anything from a spam email. The
information you give out to a spammer could be used for
illegal purposes. You could probably end up being a
victim of identity theft.

7) Black List every spammers email addresses.

To do this, you have to find the email address of the
spammer. Most spammers do not give their email addresses
in the 'From' box of the email or they give a phoney one.

To find out his real email address, click the 'File'
button on your email program. Then, when a window opens,
click on 'Properties.' This will open a window with two
tabs - General and Detail.

The 'General' tab will show you the message source and
display the email address of the sender. But the 'Detail'
tab will give you more details like IP address and the
email address of the sender.

Once you have the email address of the spammer, add it
to your 'Black List' in your email program. This is
somewhat of a tedious process I know. It will innitially
take some time to black list email addresses of every
spammer. But, believe me, it will surely be worth your
trouble on the long run.

The above tips, if followed, will greatly reduce the spam
you receive and save you a lot of annoyance, aggravation,
frustration and time.

One more point worth mentioning is the saying "To reduce
spam, do not be a spammer."



You may publish this article, free of charge in your e-zine
or any publication.

The article must be published in its entirety, unedited,
without any changes to its content. You may format the
article to fit your requirements.

The resource box at the end of this article must be
included with the article.

A courtsey copy of your ezine or publication in which the
article is published will be appreciated.
email: article@business-development-strategies.com

Format 60 CPL. Word count 812 Copyright Patrick Silva, 2004

Top 7 tips for reducing spam.

Spam, also known as unsolicited emails is the scurge of the
Internet. Like annoying phone calls from telemarketers
trying to sell you something while you are having dinner,
spam is irretating, frustrating and takes up a lot of your
valuable time.

Spammers use special software called Email Harvesting
Robots to scour the Internet 24/7, 365 days a year to find
and gather email addresses.

These Robots look for the '@' symbol which is the symbol
used in all email addresses. Then they extract your email
address, without your knowledge or permission and add it
to their email address data base.

If you post your email address on your web site, your
e-zine, forums, chat rooms or anywhere on the Internet,
you are laying yourself wide open to email harvesting
robots and spammers.

Some unscrupulous scum send viruses through spam email that
can mess up or distroy your computer. Some of the viruses
that the spammers email you hide inside your system files,
replicate themselves and mail themselves to everyone in
your address book.

Spam is becoming such a huge problem that the US Government
is passing legislation to regulate unsolicited emails.
However the US Government has no control over spam that
originates in other countries.

Therefore, spam is a scurge that governments might not be
able to control.

But we, as individuals can protect ourselves by doing
whatever we can to reduce the amount of spam we receive.
Here are seven tips that will help you reduce spam.

1) NEVER EVER respond or reply to a spam email no matter
how tempting, curious or annoying the message is. Keep
your cool. If you do reply, the spammer will know that
your email address is an active one. Do not open any
attachments. Just delete the spam.

2) Never click on the 'unsubscribe' link in a spam email.
If you do, again the spammer will know that your email
address is active. He will sell your email address to
other spammers. The spam you receive will double or
tripple.

3) Protect your primary email address. This is the one that
you get from your Internet Service Provider (ISP.) Do
not give out your primary email address to anyone unless
you trust them. If you want to subscribe to a newsleter
with your primary email address, make sure that you read
the terms of use and their privacy policy.

4) Have an 'All Purpose' email address like a Yahoo or a
Hotmail email address to post in forums, chat rooms etc.
The email you receive to these addresses are web-based.
You can read your Yahoo or Hotmail email messages on your
Yahoo or Hotmail account on their web site without
downloading them into your computer. You can delete all
the spam right from those web sites.

5) If you have your own web site and have to give out your
email address for people to contact you, you can 'cloak'
your email address by substituting the HTML code for the
'@' symbol. This way, the email harvesting robots will
not be able to extract your email address from your
web site.

When you cloak your email address, you can include an
active email link such as 'Contact me' or 'Email me.'
When your contact clicks on the active email link, her
email program will open with your email address in the
'To' box.

6) Never ever buy anything from a spam email. The
information you give out to a spammer could be used for
illegal purposes. You could probably end up being a
victim of identity theft.

7) Black List every spammers email addresses.

To do this, you have to find the email address of the
spammer. Most spammers do not give their email addresses
in the 'From' box of the email or they give a phoney one.

To find out his real email address, click the 'File'
button on your email program. Then, when a window opens,
click on 'Properties.' This will open a window with two
tabs - General and Detail.

The 'General' tab will show you the message source and
display the email address of the sender. But the 'Detail'
tab will give you more details like IP address and the
email address of the sender.

Once you have the email address of the spammer, add it
to your 'Black List' in your email program. This is
somewhat of a tedious process I know. It will innitially
take some time to black list email addresses of every
spammer. But, believe me, it will surely be worth your
trouble on the long run.

The above tips, if followed, will greatly reduce the spam
you receive and save you a lot of annoyance, aggravation,
frustration and time.

One more point worth mentioning is the saying "To reduce
spam, do not be a spammer."

Patrick Silva is a Seminar Instructor, A public Speaker and
a Researcher. He is the editor of 'A Learners Lounge,' a
free e-zine dedicated to inspire and motivate you to
achieve success. To subscribe, click on the link below
www.business-development-strategies.com/e-zine.html