SPAM

What is Spam | How did they get my e-mail address | What can I do

 

Signal Design has written a program that Hides your e-mail address from SpamBots. (A spambot is a computer program designed to crawl the internet (like a search engine's bot) and look for email addresses from random web sites.)

The program takes your e-mail address and encrypts it on your web page, using RSA encryption (10 bit). Then, when a spambot crawls your site, it just sees some javascript functions and a garbled string that it doesn't understand.

We will also display your e-mail address on the web page as an image file, ensuring that there is no e-mail information on your web page that the spambot can read.

Example:

The Program is a small but powerful utility that works in all Java enabled browsers and does not make your page any slower to load.

Each new e-mail address has a unique code which can also include a subject line if required.

We can provide just the encrypted code for your webmaster to upload to your site (35 euro) or we can place the code and image file on your site for you (65 euro).

If you would like to avail of this service, please e-mail your requirements and site details to us and we can normally provide the code the same day or upload to your site by the next working day.

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What is spam?
Spam is all those annoying e-mails you receive trying to sell you something you don't want, flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it.
Most spam is commercial advertising, often for dubious products, get-rich-quick schemes, or links to dubious web sites.
Spam costs the sender very little to send -- most of the costs are paid for by the recipient or the carriers rather than by the sender.

Why do I get spam?
Spam is the cheapest possible form of advertising. Because spam is so incredibly cheap to send, spammers implement a scorched-earth policy when sending out mailings.
If only one or two people respond out of ten thousand, they've just made a profit. Of course, the low cost of spam and lack of concrete regulation lends to the low quality of advertisements found in spam.

What's so bad about it anyway?
Do you really enjoy going to check your email and finding that the majority of it is spam that you're not interested in? How much time is wasted in the workplace reading/deleting spam.
Since spam is not a targeted form of advertising, there's no telling what type of "products" they'll receive advertisements for. And, due to the nature of the internet, spam can cost you more money to receive than it costs the advertiser to send. This is especially true when you take into account the amount of time it takes you to deal with spam (3 seconds to a minute), verses the amount of time it took the spammer to send that message (less than half a second).

Spam? Spammers? Are these made-up words?
No, they're real. Spam is slang for unsolicited email, usually sent to a very large number of email addresses. Spammers are the people who do the sending of the spam. They're not always the people who are doing the advertising.
Some spammers charge other companies to do the dirty work of mass emailing. And spam bots are computer programs designed to crawl the internet (like a search engine's bot) and look for email addresses.

Well, can't I just 'reply to be removed'?
Wait! You might want to think twice about that. Yes, some honest bulk-emails will honor your request to be removed (big companies, reputable charities, etc). On the other hand, more and more spammers are using the 'reply to be removed' clause as a way to verify that your email address is active. Which means that they'll just send you even more spam, once they know you're reading it. So think twice about it.

How did they get my email address in the first place?
You either:
Posted to a forum/guestbook and left your email address.
Signed up to receive mailings from a company with a poor privacy policy.
Put your email address on your personal or business website.

So what can I do?
Signal Design has written a program that Hides your email address from SpamBots.

The program takes your email address and encrypts it on your web page, using RSA encryption (10 bit). Then, when a spambot crawls your site, it just sees some javascript functions and a garbled string that it doesn't understand.

We will also display your e-mail address on the web page as an image file, ensuring that there is no e-mail information on your web page that the spambot can read.

Is there anything else I can do?
You can "Block Sender" in your e-mail client (such as Outlook /Outlook Express), this will ensure that further e-mails from this sender will go directly into Deleted Items folder. This method does work but is limited as spammers expect you to do this and set up many bogus e-mail accounts often changing them on a daily basis.

You can also incorporate a spam filter into your e-mail client. Different program's work in different ways, but generally they allow you to set up a black list of e-mail addresses and subjects containing key words which they filter and delete unwanted e-mails as appropriate.

A combination of these three steps should eliminate most of your spam problems.

For more indepth information on spam - visit http://spam.abuse.net/

 

 

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