Project: Plan To Reduce Spam

Several proven methods of reducing the amount of spam you receive—and some ways to reduce the profits of those who send it.

Below I detail a viable and proven plan to reduce spam. This is a plan that we, normal everyday people with e-mail inboxes, can do while we wait for our various governments to finish dragging their feet. This plan works. I've been doing it for years. If more people employ this plan, I sincerely believe we will force a major reduction in spam for everyone.

Spammers—or, as they like to be called, "e-mail marketeers"—get e-mail addresses in three distinct ways:

Method One: E-Mail Harvesters

First, they routinely crawl websites and the sites to which they link using automated, search-engine-like bots called "e-mail harvesters" or "spambots".

Harvesters just crawl around the Web (and other Internet services like Usenet Newsgroups, chat rooms, instant messenger service member directories, etc.) looking for the @ symbol, a required part of any e-mail address. When an @ is found, the harvester captures it and any and all characters to either side of the @, until it encounters a space, punctuation, or an HTML tag. So it would grab the address bob@bob.com from all of the following passages:

"...to contact me, please e-mail me at bob@bob.com any time..."

"Post By: <a href="mailto:bob@bob.com">Bob</A>"

"...so I said to bob (<a href="mailto:bob@bob.com">e-mailBob</A>) that it wasn't his..."

You might notice how example number two is a common sight on a blog. That's from where my e-mail address was compromised: Someone's blog.

Your e-mail address is not even safe in the following example:

"...to contact me, please e-mail me at bob@NOSPAMbob.com any time..."

It isn't safe because this is such a common trick. Inserting a harvester-fouling phrase like "NOSPAM" or "N0-SPAM" (note zero in the second example) doesn't really foul harvesters any more. This trick is several years old, and harvesters and "spam-bots" are pre-programmed to strip out such common trickery.

Want proof of any of this? Set up a dummy Yahoo! or Hotmail account and use it only to post to blogs or newsgroups, even with some kind of spam-bot-fouling trickery. Keep the account up for a few months and watch it gradually accumulate more and more spam.

For the record, Yahoo! accounts not added to the member directory are reportedly pretty safe from "spontaneous" spam. If you don't use it anywhere, it shouldn't accumulate spam.

Method Two: Chain Letters

This second method is much smaller, though still very successful. The third method, below, is the most wide-spread and is responsible for the largest portion of spam in your inbox.

The second method employed to collect e-mail addresses for spam is Chain letters.

"Send this to seven people (after you make a wish). Make sure it is sent as soon as you read it or your wish won't come true." This is an actual quote from a message I received recently. I get these from time to time, like most everyone else. The message usually contains a joke or an offer for money or a plea to help some non-existent stricken child or blah blah. They're scams, folks. The purpose behind chain letters is to harvest e-mail addresses.

Look at the last chain letter you received. What's in there? The main body, sure. What else? Yes. That. The address of the person who sent you the chain letter, and the addresses of everyone else to whom she sent it. Look further, below all the ">". There are more e-mail addresses, the addresses of those who received the message at the same time as the person who sent it to you... And all the people before them, and before them, and before them, and...

There is often a list of several dozen (or more) e-mail addresses, nearly all of which are guaranteed as good and functioning because they were specifically and innocently chosen by the well-meaning sender. The original sender was not well-meaning, however. The original sender is counting on the law of averages (one person sends it to seven, each of whom sends it to seven others, each of whom sends it to seven others, and so on) to eventually get the message back to him or to someone he knows. When he does get it back, he'll have a fresh list of hundreds of validated e-mail addresses ripe for his latest XXX advertisement.

If you feel you simply must pass along a chain letter, please, for the piece of mind of those with whom you like enough to share the message, use this very, very simple trick: It's called the BCC field. Blind Carbon Copy.

Put your address in the To field.
Enter the addresses of your recipients in the BCC field.
Please also be kind enough to protect those not savvy enough to protect themselves by stripping out the e-mail addresses of previous senders.
To be extra safe and protect yourself, add these very instructions to the bottom of the message, right next to where it says "send this to seven people" so that your recipients will also learn to protect themselves and their friends (you among them).

Addresses in the BCC field will not be shown in the message. Thus you will be protecting your friends while sharing with them.

Method Three: Buying Lists

The third and most successful way spammers obtain e-mail addresses is by buying them as part of lists. You put yourself on these lists. Or, more accurately, you give your e-mail address to apparently trustworthy sites that turn around sell your address.

Often sites like IffySite.com will supplement their primary income by selling the e-mail addresses of members/customers/whatever. This is a pretty lucrative practice, believe it or not, and extremely prevalent despite the proliferation of claims of privacy. Most privacy policies state that sites, their owners, and "affiliates" are allowed to send you mail they think will interest you. This is the clause that allows them to legally sell your address to spammers.

Since I own several domains, with the ability to create an unlimited number of e-mail addresses, I have the luxury of doing a little more in terms of identifying from whence spam originates. Any site on which I don't feel safe providing my e-mail address, but am required to for some reason, I "key" the address to the site. For example I might enter the e-mail address of iffysite.com@myrealdomain.com (where @myrealdomain.com is actually my real domain name) when filling out a form on the fictitious IffySite.com. Mail addressed to this new address will automatically deliver to my primary POP3 e-mail account unless I specifically configure my server to do something else with that mail. Later I'll explain some of the things I do with those addresses... And what you can do to reduce spam.

If/when spam arrives to my new, keyed-address, I know that IffySite.com has compromised my e-mail address somehow. If it was used in some kind of public or semi-public posting—a forum or online profile, for example—then spam is be expected. Anywhere e-mail addresses appear enmasse, harvesters will be pointed. However, if the only place iffysite.com@myrealdomain.com appears is in a single form I've filled out on IffySite.com—say, a registration or order form—and it generates spam from sources not obviously affiliated with IffySite.com, I know that IffySite.com is not a trustworthy business entity and sells its member/customer/whatever list.

This method of keying an e-mail address is a much more accurate way of knowing how trustworthy a particular site or business is than trusting in their often meaningless privacy policies—many of which are often simply ripped from another site.

So what do I when I realize that IffySite.com is selling my e-mail address to spammers? I do the same thing you can do.

Depending on the severity of the spam—one piece here and there or suddenly dozen—I will take one or more of the following actions:

Add the address iffysite.com@myrealdomain.com to an Outlook rule I've created that kills all messages sent to a range of addresses;
Configure my mail server to automatically destroy all messages to iffysite.com@myrealdomain.com before Outlook downloads them;
Configure my mail server to deliver all messages addressed to iffysite.com@myrealdomain.com to a special mailbox I keep on the server simply to collect spam, which I often later followup with a complaint to anti-spam groups and lists, or;
Create an auto-forwarder address on my mail server that sends all messages addressed to iffysite.com@myrealdomain.com to the e-mail address of the registered Owner or Administrative, Billing, or Technical Contact for the domain name IffySite.com.

The last option I use sparingly, but I feel perfectly justified in it.

The last option is the crux of the plan to reduce spam for everyone.

The Plan To Reduce Spam

If my address was sold to a spammer, then it was a human being who made the decision to sell my address. It was a human being who profited from my frustration. Let him deal with the spam he intended for me. Let him feel the frustration I would have felt by all this unwanted mail. Let him pay for the lost productive time and connection charges. Let him change his e-mail address to avoid that flow of spam. Remember: The terms of domain ownership stipulate that the e-mail address on file for a contact must be current at all times, so changing that e-mail address requires some effort and is usually a great inconvenience to the owner... Just as it would be if I had to change my e-mail address, as IffySite.com's representative should well realize.

What's more, by forwarding spam intended for me back to either the person directly responsible for it or at least to the person responsible for setting, maintaining, and changing the policies of the company that caused my address to be sold to spammers, I hope to influence, in my small way, the move away from profiting from selling trusting customers'/users'/registrants' e-mail addresses.

Keep in mind that once one's working e-mail address is on a spam list it will be sold and resold and propogated. The flow of spam will grow exponentially from even a single initial appearance on a single list. Once you begin receiving spam at an address it will not stop until long after that address is proven to be inactive and no longer accepting mail. Let the person who made the decision to sell your address suffer the consequences of his own actions.

I encourage everyone with the ability to do this type of keying and forwarding back to do it. If only a few thousand of the Internet's several million users sent their spam back to the person or organization that sold it, far, far fewer companies would consider it profitable to sell customers'/users'/registrants' e-mail addresses.

Don't try to send it back to the spammer. Don't mail bomb the spammer with a thousand messages. That won't work. The spammer will not see it. They use bogus From addresses (yes, unlike much of the practice of spamming, forging a return address is illegal in the United States, but they do it anyway). Often they use the address of the next recipient on the list as the sender's address to avoid bounced mail, thus you'll be mail bombing the next poor shmuck who, just like you, was unlucky enough to trust a company or individual who sold his e-mail address. Instead, send all your spam back to the originating site by keying your e-mail address.

I have absolutely no guilt about sending spam intended for me back to the person who is responsible for it. I'm most satisfied by the fact that I'll never see it. I don't let Outlook do that kind of forwarding work; I do it all on my mail server(s) before it gets to my inbox. It's just a simple matter of setting up a Mail Forwarder. Your hosting company can help you do it in 30 seconds or less.

By keying the address and sending that mail back to the originating site's contact, I have reduced my spam over the years. This is a viable, proven plan to reduce spam. Nearly everyone with a virtual or dedicated server nowadays can do this.

If you do it too, you'll frustrate a few more people who profit from your frustration. If several hundred do it we'll cause some businesses to stop the practice of selling e-mail addresses. If several thousand of us do it, then many businesses will cease the practice of selling our e-mail adresses, and we will force a reduction in spam for everyone.

Dialogue: Questions? Comments?

Questions? Comments? Post them here, to this topic on my blog. By the way, e-mail addresses are not required on my blog. Should you provide it to subscribe to responses, it will be protected programmically by special coding in the page. Moreover, I categorically do not sell or redistribute e-mail addresses.

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