By Kara van de Pol
1. Don't be too free with your email address. If you aren't sure you can trust the recipient, keep it to yourself.
2. Get yourself a throwaway email account. Sign up for a free Yahoo!, Hotmail or Netscape account and supply its address whenever you are asked for your email address online. Give your main address only to trusted correspondents.
3. Disguise your address online. Trick spambots by presenting your address in a way that only humans can interpret. Write it out like this: me at mysite dot co za or [email protected]. Sadly, some newsgroups and message boards won't allow you to mask your address.
4. Get a strange alias. Pick a unique address containing letters and numbers. Your friends may find it hard to remember, but at least messages from them won't have to fight it out with your spam.
5. Never reply to a spammer. Any response, as far as a spammer is concerned, is a good one. Think twice about leaving an out of office auto-reply on your email when you're on holiday. And be suspicious of unsubscribe links.
6. Use a filter. There are dozens of decent spam-filtering programs out there. As a matter of principle and good sense, don't pick one that lands in your inbox as junk mail.
7. Set up message rules. You can usually send unwanted email straight into your deleted-items folder based on predefined criteria and keywords. Check your email client's help page for details.
8. Modify the address on your website. If you have a website and want your address on it, things get a little trickier. This is because mailto tags - the coding needed to make an email link clickable - are eagerly sniffed out by spambots. One solution is to use html escape codes to confuse bots. Instead of using a href=mailto:[email protected] (enclosed in html coding brackets - < >), disguise the mailto link like this: a href=mailto:[email protected] (enclosed in html coding brackets - < >).
More advanced webmasters can also use JavaScript to hide clickable addresses.
9. Report them. Send the spammer's message (with the full email header included) to your ISP's abuse@ address. Different email clients offer the display headers option in different places: in Outlook Express, open the message, select view and then all headers; in Microsoft Outlook you'll need to go to view and then options.
10. Boycott them. Spammers persist in their pernicious practices because some people out there are making money. Don't ever reward them with your business, no matter how enticing their wares may seem.
- Useful links
www.ftc.gov
Federal Trade Commission
www.cauce.org
The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email
Spamlaws.com
Laws in the US and Europe
Spam.org
Info about reducing spam on the Internet
Tiscali's abuse page
www.tiscali.co.za/help/abuse
M-Web's abuse page
www.mweb.co.za/help/spam.asp
www.tucows.co.za
Local site for shareware anti-spam filters
- This article can be found in the November edition of South Africa's Popular Mechanics.