Introduction
Every day, literally millions of unsolicited email messages are sent by unscrupulous businesses trying to make a buck. They play a numbers game, blanketing the Internet with their spam in the hope that even a tiny percentage of recipients will open their messages and purchase their products and services.
If you’ve had your email address for awhile, and especially if you’ve made your address public on a web site, news group or even in a chat room, chances are you’re receiving spam regularly. Spammers buy and sell lists of valid email addresses, which is why you may be receiving more and more spam as time goes by. Spammers don’t care who they hurt. Children receive pornographic content and unsuspecting people are duped out of their money by email scams.
Ugly Truth
Spam comprises as much as 68% of all emails received throughout the world! It costs end users, businesses and ISPs money, time and bandwidth. Spam clogs mail servers and wastes recipient’s time. Corporations lose money as productivity is decreased by employees sifting through spam to find legitimate messages. Important emails easily get lost and precious time is wasted trying to re-establish missed communications. In 2005, spam cost U.S. businesses $17 billion in lost productivity (Information Week).
So what can you do to reduce the amount of spam you receive? Don’t use your main email address to sign up for anything online – instead, use a Hotmail or Yahoo account for that. Or better yet, use a disposable email address from a service like the ones listed on TipMonkies.com. Don’t post your real email address online, in newsgroups, or in chat rooms. Make sure you pay attention to the options when signing up for informational email on a site – it may ask your permission to send you “email from related 3rd parties”. This is what’s known as “opt-in email” – not spam strictly speaking, but often unwelcome nonetheless. Sometimes spammers try every possible name combination at a particular domain in the hope that they’ll hit a valid email address. They send out millions of messages or use address lists, hoping that even a tiny percentage of recipients take them up on their dubious offers. One way to beat the spammers is to never buy what they’re selling and to never even visit the URLs they send. Unfortunately many people fall into the trap and end up clicking those links. Spammers see this as an invitation to keep hawking their wares.
Luckily for us end users, there are special weapons available to fight the war against spam in the form of spam filters. Spam filters do just what their name implies: they filter out spam messages from the rest of your legitimate incoming email. Some filters use whitelists and blacklists (or blackhole lists), which contain the names of friendly emailers and spammers, respectively. You can add the addresses of friends, family and coworkers to your whitelist. Blacklists are databases of known spam addresses and servers compiled by anti-spam groups like SpamCop. Bayesian filters use a mathematical algorithm called na