Re: spam control

Bruce Chambers wrote:

> joe wrote:
> > I was looking for help on my windows
> > but people told if I post in newsgroup
> > I will get spam.
> >
> > I haven't put my email here like this
> > 1xtrucker@xxxxxxx
> > so how can they spam me?
> >
>
> Actually, if that's your real email address, you've posted it twice,
> once in the your post's headers, and once in the body of the post. That
> address will soon be inundated with spam.
>
> While it's not possible to completely eliminate spam (unsolicited
> commercial email), there are some precautions and steps you can take to
> minimize it's impact:
>
> 1) Never, ever post your real email address to publicly accessible
> forums or newsgroups, such as this one, as you have done. For years
> now, spammers have been using software utilities to scan such places to
> harvest email addresses. It's a simple matter to disguise your posted
> email address so that these software "bots" can't obtain anything
> useful. For example, insert some obviously bogus characters or words
> into your reply address, for example: "name@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
>
> 2) Never, ever reply to any spam you receive, even to "unsubscribe" or
> "remove" yourself from the spammers' address lists; you'll only compound
> the problem. If spammers had any intention of honoring the your desire
> not to receive spam, they wouldn't have become spammers in the first
> place. When you reply to a spammer, all you're doing is confirming that
> he/she has a valid, marketable email address.
>
> 3) Be especially leery of any offers from websites for free software,
> services, information, etc, that require your email address, or that
> require your email address so you can "login" to access the offered
> service and/or information. Many such sites are supplementing their
> income by collecting addresses to sell to the spammers. For instance,
> subscribing to CNN.COM's Breaking News Service will garner you a lot of
> additional spam. (Of course, not all such sites have under-handed
> motives; it's a judgment call. If the offer seems "too good to be
> true," it's most likely a scam.)
>
> 4) DO forward any and all spam, with complete headers, to the
> originating ISP with a complaint. Not all ISPs will make an effort to
> shut down the spammers, but many will. One tool that makes forwarding
> such complaints fairly simple is SpamCop (http://spamcop.net).
>
> 4) Another useful tool is MailWasher (http://www.mailwasher.net). This
> utility allows you to preview your email before downloading it from the
> server. Spammers can even be blacklisted, so that any future emails
> from them will be automatically deleted from the server.
>
> 5) Within Outlook Express or whatever other email client application
> you use, add any spammers to your Blocked Senders list, so the their
> messages are automatically deleted from the server without being
> downloaded to your PC.
>
> --
>
> Bruce Chambers
>
> Help us help you:
> http://dts-l.org/goodpost.htm
> http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
>
> You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having
> both at once. - RAH

Actually, address harvesting from Microsoft newsgroups by "spambots" seems to be
-- these days at least -- an urban legend. I use this hotmail address to post
in newsgroups on the theory that (1) because I don't use it for my regular
email, I don't care if it gets spammed and (2) if it becomes inundated with spam
I can just abandon it and set up another "throwaway" address. Over the past
year, however, I have noticed that the hotmail address gets as many as five spam
emails a week, while my "real" email address -- which I don't use to post in
usenet newsgroups -- gets about 20 a day. YMMV.

That being said, it can't hurt to be prudent and disguise email addresses used
in public newsgroups.

.

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