Spam
I have been dealing with spam for a very long time. I have been online since 2400 baud modems. Yep. Didn't take long before I started getting it. I remember when they coined the term as a matter of fact (a dark day for Hormel® to be sure). I can remember when I would go days, sometimes weeks without receiving any email. Then, slowly at first, I began to see it appear. The early days of spam (the email kind) brought some legitimate offers. In fact some were downright tempting ... But, those days were short lived. The spam began pouring in. Waaaay back when I was first starting out, back when computers were still made of wood (I had a deluxe model with a butter churn built in), and laptops were red, had two knobs and you had to turn them upside down and shake to reboot (oh wait, that was my etch-a-sketch®) we had to actually download our mail. The vast majority of people (yes, I'll admit it, me too) had AOL, or Prodigy and we all had to pay by the moment. Yes, so in addition to wading through the spam, we got to pay top dollar to download it as well.
Why am I feeling nostalgic all of a sudden? Since that time, I have created more web sites then I can even remember. Yup, hundreds of web sites ... All of them have something to the effect of Problems? Contact Webmaster@SuchAndSuch.com I then FORWARDED ALL MAIL TO MY REAL ADDRESS. Over the years, the number of sites I authored grew. Everything was good. My skills were improving, I was making a name for myself ... I began to notice 10, 15, 30 a day. The dreaded mailing lists had begun to appear. The trickle of email, became a steady stream, but it was still manageable. Annoying, but manageable.
Then it happened ... I can remember the day it started, my spam went through the roof, literally overnight; BOTS were unleased. Bots, spambots, scrapers, harvestors, mail spiders, whatever you want to call them, hit the scene. A bot is a program that does a certain task, over and over and over again. Bots operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. They don't sleep, they don't stop, ever. In the case of spambots, they move from page to page following links, indexing any and all email addresses as they go. They read the code behind the page, so they can "see" the email addresses even if you can't.
The bots store the email in databases. They will be catagorized whenever possible. For instance, if your email address is on a web page containing words like: REALTOR®, Real Estate, New Homes, MLS, etc ... then guess what, your email will be "profiled". Then the mailing list companies then charge a premium to send spam to all real estate emails, or medical, or lawyers or people that like sailing, or whatever. They only charge a few hundred bucks per hundred thousand emails, so there is no shortage of companies willing to use the mailing list's services ... As a real estate professional, your email address is considered prime. Thousands of companies what to sell you something, hence the massive amounts of spam you receive every day.
This is of course in addition to the companies that will send billions of emails to everybody. Oh, yes, you get included in those too. Viagra, All-natural Breast Enhancements, Nigerian 419's, Stock Tips, Phishing Scams, all of it. Phooey.
Why am I telling you this? Perhaps, it's because I like you. No? Ok, maybe because I receive somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,500 emails A DAY! Perhaps I just dislike the spammers. All of the above, I suppose.
If I had a dollar (used to be a nickel, but have you seen gas prices lately?) for every person that asked me what they could do about spam, I could buy that small country I've always wanted.
Well, there are a few things:
- Don't enter contests (just go ahead and fill out that card with your email addy and drop it in that shiny new car that you can win in the middle of your local mall, I dare you. How do you suppose they pay for those?)
- Be careful what companies you give your email address to, especially online, if you are buying something or for some reason you need to, have a spare address (check out hotmail.com) and use that.
- Use MS Outlook 2003. It has excellent filters.
I have had "issues" with products from Norton, McAfee and other so called "spam filters" and do not recommend them, however, that's my opinion, you are free to do as you wish.
I have however found a pretty cool utility. When somebody sends you an email, it replies and asks for verification. If verified, the email is forwarded. I am not totally sold on it, but you may want to give it a try. It is called, SpamArrest and you can find it here.
If you do, please let me know what you think of it. Good luck and I wish you a spam-free day.
