- Spam / Junk mail -

Spam and Junk e-mails are unwanted and usually offensive e-mails that arrive to your mailbox regularly and repeatedly without your consent. However, receiving e-mail from someone you do not know is not classed as spam. If the e-mail is legitimate and meant personally for you it is not classed as spam. The term spam and spamming refer to the repeated nature of the communication, so therefore if your boss at work sends you a legitimate e-mail 10 times in a very short space of time, it would be classed as spamming and you could in theory get your boss black listed from sending you e-mail. Spamming can also occur on website guest books, and forums / message boards. If someone posts a message more than once in a row without anyone else having time to reply, people usually get upset and accuse the writer of spamming. No one likes spam / junk mail, it costs time and effort and can close mailboxes due to the sheer amount of inbound e-mail. There have been cases where a particular mail address has had in excess of 40,000 mails per day. Needless to say the mailbox had to be abandoned, and the company had to change all of the letter headings, stationary and any other printed contact details.

- How spam works -

The majority of spam and junk e-mails consist of advertisements, money scam pleas, and adult content material. The reason you may generally receive junk mail is because your e-mail address has been added to a spam mail list / database, and all the mail that is sent out via that spam provider is sent to all the e-mail addresses in the list, including yours. Lots of the mailing lists share information with each other in order to have a bigger database, and many spam providers gather mail addresses, and sell them in bulk to those who operate the spam databases. There are also legitimate mailing lists. For example you may have joined up to a website offering a monthly newsletter with useful information. On this e-mail there will be a link to remove yourself from the mailing list. Once you click on this link, you will be removed from the database, and you will no longer receive the mail. However with spam mail, when you click on the link to remove yourself form the mailing list, what you are actually doing is informing the spam database that your mailbox is active, and that someone does actually look at that mail address. The spam list will place the mail address in a higher priority meaning you may get more spam and for a longer period. It is also futile trying to reply to spam sending mail addresses, as most of the sending and replying addresses are false. The only thing you should do with spam, is delete it or report it.

Another way for your mail address to reach a spam list is web site crawlers and spiders. These programs are constantly scouting the internet, scanning all text, looking for certain criteria that may match an email address (such as the @ symbol) and submitting it to the spam engine. These crawlers then follow all links from that web page onto whichever page they link to, and repeat the process on the next page. This is done over and over and most pages on the Internet can be scanned in this way, as most website have a link to a different website of some sort. As it is impossible to make sure no one links to your website (and rather bad for business), they key here is to disguise your e-mail address so that it cannot be added by the crawlers and spiders. This method is called Munging. See the section below for further information.

- What to do with spam -

Spam is illegal in a lot of countries (the whole of Europe has declared an outlaw on spamming) due to the scale of the junk mail problem. However this does not stop the offenders from holding the databases and sending sources in those countries who have not banned spamming. As spamming is illegal in Europe you can report the spam issue to your ISP (if they provide this service, which most will do), and your ISP can track the spam back to its sources. If the source is a company of any description it can be reported and blacklisted, and in some countries, forced to attend court proceedings. Contact your ISP and ask them if they have any spam or abuse reporting measures. If so they may provide you with an e-mail address to send the spam headers to.

- How to avoid spam -

Avoid or limit displaying your e-mail address anywhere in the public domain. Forums, guest books and chat rooms are a danger. Having your mail address displayed on your own website can generate spam. Avoid entering your address into any websites when you create an account unless you read the privacy policy / EULA (End User License Agreement) to see if they can sell your mail address. Have a secondary mail account that you don't mind giving out. Have nothing important going to this mail account so that if you start receiving spam and wish to remove / delete the account you can with no worry. There are disposable mail accounts online that forward mail to your mailbox. If you wish to delete the mail account you can. This is ideal as you can hand out mail addresses to people and not worry about the long term effects of spam mail. Use a mail filter. Many ISPs provide this feature for free. Don't reply to any chain letters, advertisements, adult material, credit scams or anything that comes to you without your consent. This is the safest method of spam protection.

- Munging -

Munging (MUN-jing) is the act of disguising an e-mail address so that a human reader can discern the genuine mail address, whereas an automated service such as a crawler or spider would not. This includes adding junk text or numbers to the end of the mail address, replacing the @ symbol, and removing the .com suffix at the end.

For example, if your genuine mail address is 'dummy@dummy.mail' you could change it to 'dummy@dummy.mailSPAM' and give instructions to remove the SPAM at the end of the mail. You could also replace the '@' symbol 'dummyXdummy.mail' and give instructions to replace the 'X' symbol. Please be sure not to replace your mail address with that of a third party legitimate mail address. So for example, if you swap 'dummy.mail' with 'Microsoft.com', the spiders will be adding the mail address at Microsoft.com, which could end up with Microsoft taking action against you.

If you do this correctly, the mail that gets submitted to the spam lists will not be valid and you should not receive any spam. That does not stop a human spam recruiter from adding the mail address, but this greatly reduces the chance of a spam crawler finding your correct mail address.

Many websites are now finding a way to fight back against the spam / junk mail empire. One such way is to have a page full of randomly generated non legitimate mail addresses. For example 'qubfsdj@uihgaliuhsruihgse.fdsjobsailubv' is the correct mail format for a mail address, but does not exist as the suffix - '.fdsjobsailubv' is not allowed.

One such website that incorporates this is http://www.hostedscripts.com/scripts/antispam.html This website is a great help toward the fight against spam. As mentioned before, this website randomly generates 100 false emails. If you refresh the page, you will see that the mail addresses are different each time. The final link on the page then links back to the same page with 100 new mail addresses. The idea behind this is that a spider / crawler will get stuck in a loop adding all the mail addresses to its list, then link back to the same page adding a further 100 junk mail addresses and the cycle will continue indefinitely. All these false mail boxes will produce an error message each time a mail is sent to them, effectively spamming the spammers every time they try to send an e-mail. As time goes on, the lists are filling up with more and more junk mail boxes.

If you find any web sites such as this, add a link to them at some point on your website in the fight against spam / junk mail.