Knock Out Spam With the One-Two Punch
by Sharon Fling
Are you sick of spam relentlessly spewing into your emailbox? So was I,
until I learned how to knock it out, or at least slow it down, with my
one-two punch. Do both of these things, neither of which will cost you a
penny, and enjoy a distinct decrease in the amount of garbage in your inbox.
Here we go:
#1- Mail Washing
First, hit the spam with Mailwasher, available free at www.mailwasher.net.
This easy to set up little program lets you preview email before downloading
it. You see all the usual details - sender, subject, size - but with one big
difference: you can decide BEFORE downloading if you want it.
You get, I'm sure, many emails that you wouldn't have downloaded if only
you'd known what was in them. That's just one thing Mailwasher can do for
you. Its real power is in its ability to 'bounce' unwanted messages (spam)
right back to the person who sent it, marked 'message undeliverable.'
To the spammer it looks as if your e-mail address is no longer active, and
hopefully, the next time they 'clean' their list, your email address will
fall off. But even if it doesn't, Mailwasher adds the spammer's address to a
blacklist. The next time they spam you, it's already marked for deletion.
(You can always unmark it.)
When you're finished 'washing' your mail of spam and unwanted downloads,
click 'process mail' and whatever messages are left will be downloaded as
usual when you log on through your e-mail program, which you can do directly
from MailWasher.
I have over 20 email addresses, so you can imagine the flood of spam that
poured in my mailbox every day. Now I run them all through Mailwasher first,
and it has made a huge difference.
To further reduce spam, Mailwasher has another trick that your regular email
program doesn't. It learns. There are all kinds of settings, filters, sorts
and alerts. The more you use it, the more it learns what you do and don't
want to see. It does lots of stuff that I haven't even tried yet. But for
what I need - quick and dirty spam elimination - it does great.
Best of all, it's free to try. If you like it, the author asks that you pay
him whatever you think is fair. How much you pay him is up to you, but the
funds go to future development of the product. Considering how useful this
program is, I think that’s a very worthy cause. http://www.mailwasher.net
#2 - Email Encoding
Once you've got Mailwasher going, you're on your way to getting off the spam
lists. To stay off, don't skip this second step!
One of the ways that spammers get your email address is through harvesting
programs that crawl the net snatching email addresses off of websites,
message boards, newsgroups. Anywhere they can find something that looks like
an email address, they grab it. And the way that they know it's an email
address is by looking for 'mailto' or the '@' symbol.
There are programs available - also free - that will encode your email
address for you. This converts your ASCII email address into its equivalent
decimal entity. For example, the letter “a” equates to: “a” (without the
quotes), the letter “b” equates to: “b”, and so forth.
Here’s an example of an email address:
"johndoe@so
meserver.c
om"
which appears as: johndoe@someserver.com
To make the link clickable, you need to include the HREF tag, i.e.
"<a
href="mailto:no&#
115;pam@myser
8;er.com">
nospam@mys&#
101;rver.com</a>"
which appears as: nospam@myserver.com
Try it. Copy either of those expressions (WITHOUT the quotes), save it in an
HTML file, and open it in your browser. It looks and acts just like any
other email link, but the spam bots only see numbers and characters.
Here are a few free email encoders:
http://www.paksys.com/util/spamfree.php (JavaScript utility)
http://www.wbwip.com/wbw/emailencoder.html (JavaScript utility, doesn’t
include HREF tag)
http://www.siteup.com/encoder.html (emails the results to you)
Encoded e-mail addresses can be read and translated back into the original
ASCII text by almost any web browser, so you can use encoding wherever you
can use HTML. I've replaced regular email links with encoded links on all of
my websites.
Unfortunately not all forums will let you use HTML. In those cases, you’ll
have to rely on putting the NOSPAM in your email address, or using only
“throwaway” email addresses such as from Yahoo or hotmail when posting to
public places. Another trick: spell out your email address, i.e. my email
address is “sharon at geolocal.com” or “sharon at geolocal dot com.” Not as
good as being encoded and clickable but better than nothing.
Of course, spammers are a clever bunch. Whatever we come up with, they'll
find a way around. Pretty soon they'll probably program their nasty spam
bots to translate encoded emails for them.
The only answer for that is to replace email links with an IMAGE of your
email address. Only human eyes can see that an image is an email address, so
it can’t be harvested. But, *don’t* link the image to your email address
unless it’s encoded – that would defeat the purpose, which is to make your
email address unreadable by the spam bots.
The downside is that human eyes will have to manually type your address to
send you an email. Unfortunately, that includes people you WANT to hear
from. There’s no way around that. Hopefully one day we won’t need to go to
such lengths to avoid what has become the scourge of the internet.
So, to summarize,
use Mailwasher to delete and bounce spam, which hopefully will get you
dropped from spam lists, and
encode your email address on web pages and other places where it can be
harvested.
Try my one-two punch and see if it works for you. If nothing else, it will
give you the satisfaction of knowing spammers are getting useless messages
in their mailboxes too.
Sharon Fling is managing editor and owner of the premier
website for
local search engine optimization.
Join her website to take your local business onto the net successfully!
