"You've Got SPAM - Again!"

In my June 10th, 2004 entry I mentioned how happy with I was with Yahoo Premium Mail's disposable email feature. I finally felt confortable displaying an open email address in this weblog.

Due to no fault of Yahoo's, I spoke too soon. In less than 60 days the address has been harvested and is being used both to generate generic spam and it as being used as a forged source address.

When the basic email protocols were developed many years ago for the Internet they were created by people devoted to improving the network's functionality and reliability. They worked to create something wonderfully new, fun and even more importantly useful. Many of these people are still alive and must be aghast at how their creation is being abused.

Over 50% of all email is now spam and is increasing rapidly. The cost to global business is already measured in the billions of dollars(US). This does not take into account the general frustration and time lost to individuals. I've not seen any statistics, but I can imagine that for every dollar a spammer earns it costs the rest of us a great deal more.

<RANT>

Not only are these spammers parasites, but they are inefficient parasites. If they are not stopped the damage will be eventually be fatal to the entire system. My first thought was these people must be insane. How can you justify killing the very system you depend on to survive?

It took be about five seconds to realize that we human do this everywhere; the hardwood forest in the Northwest U.S. popped into my mind. The Japanese will pay fantastic prices for the hardwood. In a short time the old growth trees will be gone. Once gone they can't be replaced by those fast growing trees the lumber companies are so fond of. It will take centuries. But hey, those new floors look great!

Massive areas of ocean across the globe have been overfished to the point where there's nothing left to catch. Of course the fishermen are now demanding their governments to bail them out. It not like they could see this disaster coming.

I guess "a penny earned is..." is well, that's it. Nothing else matters. Leaving ourselves a future resource is great as long as it doesn't interfere with short-term profit.

Human greed and short-sightedness knows no limits. This fact has been with us apparently for our entire history. It goes in cycles, right now it's very bad, in other decades it's merely bad. In terms of absolute scale; the amount of biomass destroyed per day, pollution dumped per day, I'm sure it's never been greater.

Ah, but that's just dirty liberal talk... obviously not spoken by a real American...

</RANT>

OK, back to my point.. I'm sure I had one somewhere... Yes, protecting yourself from spam. This is no single answer, it's also all but impossible to protect yourself completely. Yet there are some steps you can take to help:

• Disposable Addresses:
  Use a disposable email addresses, such as those offered by Yahoo and many ISPs. This is probably the most flexible method. If the email address starts getting abused you simply drop it from the list of accepted addresses. It also allows you to see either who or from where your address are being collected. I use a different email address for every major web vendor or group. So far the legit companies have not been selling my address.

  Also according to some reports if you disable an address the volume of spam decreases sharply. It does cost the spammer a small about of money for each mailing so I guess they try to cull the known dead addresses from their lists. Because of this you might experiment with deactivating an address for a few weeks and then turning it back on.

• Spam Filters:
  I tried this both ways. Allowing my ISP provide the filtering. I've also tried to do it myself locally on my machine. For me it's been more straightforward to allow my service to do the filtering. In case of Yahoo their paid services appears to provided slightly better filtering than their free service. At a cost of less than $2/month I 'd perfer to pay.
If you wish to maintain local control of your email you can use software to filter incoming POP3 mail. My oldest email address had been in use since about 1995 and had been placed on websites and newsgroups everywhere. It's probably on every spamlist collection out there. Near the end on a light day I was receiving 200+ spam message. Like everyone I niced a slow increase in the amount of spam received. I just used the Delete button. Once I hit about 25 spam messages a day I knew I could no longer handle the problem manually. I tried some spam blocking software. The first was an absolutely horrible program from McAfee; Spamkiller. I was out about $40 and spent untold hours fighting with it's braindead behavior and McAfee's constant nags to buy more stuff from them. I then tried Norton Anti-Spam software. It's far superior to Spamkiller, yet still no walk in the park. It required a lot of time and attention to delete the many spam massages that did pass through the filter. To be safe I always needed to briefly scan the spam folder looking for mis-identified messages. If anyone is aware of any particularly good services please drop me a line at my new email address listed at the top of my weblog. I love to learn what new might be out there.
• Obfuscated Address:
  Another option is to created a obfuscated email address that should be easy for a human to understand, but difficult for an automated havesting program. If your email address is "joe@nowhere.com" some options are:

• "joeREMOVE@nowhere.com"
• "joe@REMOVEnowhere.com"
• "joe@NOSPAMnowhere.com"
• "joe[at]nowhere.com"
• "joe[at]NOSPAMnowhere.com"

I think you get the general idea. This works particular well on websites. You have complete control over what is displayed. If you're trying to post messages to newsgroups this method my be your only solution other than a disposable address. Checking the newgroups software you're using and see if you can replace your "From" and "Reply-To" fields with a obfuscated address. This method isn't foolproof. I'm certain some harvesting programs have been written to detect the most common variations. Yet every little bit helps.

• Using Javascript:
  (more to follow)