What Can I Do About All This spam?

We’ve all had the problem — we get too many emails trying to sell us things. Sometimes it is a replica watch. Other times, the email offers no-doctor-visit prescription medicines. Yeah, right… Gimme a spam filter! Hold the mayo!

spam — notice the lower case “s” — the name comes from a Monty Python skit where the speaker was overwhelmed by a chorus of people yelling “spam! spam! spam!…”. The term “spam”, used for unsolicited, unwanted commercial emails (sometimes called “UCE”), has nothing to do with the famous ground pork product that is trademarked “Spam.”

How can I get rid of it? In this first article of a series, I’ll focus on two methods. First, the method that used to work and then, what your ISP is doing about the problem.

In the early days of spam, we could use the “filter” or “rule” function in our email program to handle spammers. All we needed to do was to block emails from that sender. Or, maybe, block emails with a certain subject.

Unfortunately, there is so much money in the spam business and so little cost involved in sending spam, that spammers quickly solved that problem. Email programs began to allow us to filter emails into the trash or into a folder of our choice if the subject contained one or more words we specified. And, the spammers got smarter.

Our first line of defense in today’s war against spam is at our Internet Service Providers. Your ISP offers, or perhaps implements without offering, an anti-spam system. Most ISPs run a spam filter on all emails that arrive at their incoming mailserver. Most of these ISPs allow their customers to decide what should be done with any email the spam filter thinks is “spam.”

These choices are: “delete it,” “label it as spam,” and “send it to me anyway”.

Delete it — as tempting as this sounds, do not do it. Remember Murphy’s Law: “If anything can go wrong, it will.” The email you expect, that you really need, will be misidentified as spam and deleted.

Label it as spam — the best choice. The ISP will use the same label all the time, usually inserting it at the beginning of the subject line, something like “Subject: — SPAM –…” where … is the rest of the real subject line. Then, using the rules (Outlook, Outlook Express) or filters (same thing, different term, in Eudora, Thunderbird and others), create rule that says “if the subject contains — SPAM — , put the email in the spam folder (junk folder, probably spam folder, whatever you want to call it). The important thing is that you will get the emails and can retrieve the important ones.

Send it to me anyway — if you are running your own spam filter program, which is the subject of a later blog entry, you might consider this. If you pick this option and you are not running your own spam filter, “enjoy the spam.”

My recommendation: Use the ISP’s spam filter to mark the emails before it sends all of them to you. This solution is near and dear to my heart, since I write a free weekly computer tips newsletter from my Terry’s Computer Tips (www.terryscomputertips.com) web site. I find that most confirmation emails I receive for newsletter subscriptions, and anything else, seem to end in the spam folder.

Use the ISPs spam filter to help you. Get the email, don’t delete it. And, check you spam folder occasionally.

[Read Part 2 and Part 3 of this series]

Read more about spam filters.