Wolfram My Writing How To Stop Spam | | Search |
What is SPAM? SPAM is unsolicited email. It is the Internet's version of junk mail. Whenever you receive an email from someone you don't know, be skeptical. Don't respond to the email, because this will confirm that your email address is, in fact, read by a real person. Responding to spam will result in more SPAM to you. Don't click on any links, because the links are often coded, and clicking on one of the links will result in more SPAM in the future. Sometimes the email will try to trick you into responding with a request to be taken off the list. Don't -- this is a trick and it will result in more SPAM.
What should you do? Most importantly: If an email is asking you to forward the email to all of your friends, and if you feel compelled to do so, PLEASE make sure to first confirm that it is an email based in truth. Many emails that ask people to forward the email to all their friends are, in fact, untrue. Search UrbanLegendsZeitgeist site or Urban Legends Reference Page to make sure it's not a hoax or untrue. Type specific details of the email into the search box and press submit. It is also a good place to check and see if an email is fraudulent. BEWARE!
How to report fraudulent SPAM Here are some other suggestions on what else you can do:
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Disposible email addresses for Stopping spam
Here are some sites where you can get desposible email addresses.
Commurcial Spam filters for Stopping spam
Here are some notible filters that I have found while doing research on SPAM.
Stop people from harvesting your email from the web
People have written programs which surf the web and harvest email addresses. This is particularly annoying because it ends up stopping people from putting their contact information on the web. If you have a web site, or if you post your email address to forums or newsgroups, someone may have harvested your email address. One trick that people use to foil these email harvesting programs, is that they will modify their email address and leave instructions on how to fix it. For instance, someone will say:
"email me at nospam@wolfram.org (please replace "nospam" with "eric" in that email address.)"
That technique is a bit cumbersome, still, people use it because it works.
Personally, I recommend setting up an account at Spamgourmet and leaving those email addresses on forums or newsgroups. Also, if you have a web site with mailto links, you might want to try this Javascript trick for stopping email harvesting programs from grabbing your email off of your web site.
Here's another blog post about the effectiveness or various spam fighting ways of displaying email address on a web page
CounterExploitation -- Fighting Back Against Email Harvest Bots
What if, instead of YOUR email address, the harvester program finds hundreds and hundreds of completely bogus, invalid email addresses? Toxic Waste Dump is a program that allows you to create virtually an infinite number of bogus email addresses on bogus web pages pages (limited essentially by the amount of space you want to use for them in your Web account!)
Articles on SPAM
SPAM filtering strategies Paul Grahm's excellent article on how it should work
SPAM Filter Software that you Install
You may want to avoid spam filters that you install because they will obviously only work on the computer that you install them on, and instead you might look for hosted applications or email services that install filters at the server level.
Spam filter service for ISPs
Spamex -- a service -- shrinkwrap
About This Page
SPAM degrades the value of email. I intend on providing continued maintainanance to this page. Please let me know if anything on this page is misleading or needs updating or additions.eric@wolfram.org
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