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Junk e-mail: How to rid yourself of SPAM
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I have had my America Online (AOL) account for years. My AOL account is not my only online account, but it is one of my more important accounts. My e-mail address with AOL is waltmayo@aol.com. I'd hate to give it up, but I'm actually considering just that because SPAM is about to drive me off AOL.
SPAM - unsolicited e-mail, junk e-mail, bulk e-mail or whatever you want to call it - is beginning to threaten the Internet's viability and its credibility as a valid medium. Each day, I check my mailbox at sccoast.net, webcom.com and others without much to worry about, but when I get to my AOL mailbox, I'm greeted with chain letters, invitations to visit adult Web sites, sales pitches for every piece of junk you can imagine and other useless messages eating up bandwidth.
I'm getting sick of it.
If you haven't been hit with a daily dose of SPAM yet, get ready. What can you do to prevent yourself from becoming another SPAM victim? Or to rid yourself of SPAM if you've already become part of the junk e-mail food chain? Here are some tips to help steer you away from trouble.
How lists are created
By learning how the promoters and creators of SPAM get your e-mail address, you'll have a fighting chance of staying off their lists.
Anywhere you publicly post your e-mail address can land you on a SPAM list. These places include public news groups, IRC chat rooms and forums. If you're an America Online user, every time you go to the live chat rooms, you're susceptible.
Many SPAM list creators will monitor the "lobbies" that all AOL users are initially dumped into when heading for the chat rooms. They simply turn on their logging functions and record all the users who come in. On a busy night, any of AOL's lobbies can generate thousands of user names for the junk e-mail marketers to add to their databases.
Marketers can also use the America Online member database to look up large lists of names and addresses. In fact, because of the powerful search capability of this database, e-mail abusers can actually create interest-specific mailing lists.
What can you do to prevent yourself from being added to these lists?
Get a second address
The easiest thing to do is to avoid participating in public chat rooms or news groups, for example, but I feel this is a terrible way to handle the problem. You might as well just quit using the Internet.
A better solution is to make sure you do not use your primary Internet address when taking part in any of these activities. Get a second e-mail address. This is very easy on America Online, as with each account you can create up to five screen names. Each screen name has its own Internet address using the following form: screenname@aol.com.
If you plan to participate in news groups or AOL chat rooms, use a secondary screen name. The same principle works with standard Internet accounts. If you're not an AOL member, see if your Internet Service Provider will grant you a second e-mail address.
Your second e-mail address will eventually start to receive SPAM, but when the problem gets bad enough, just drop the e-mail address and get another one. This is also easy to do on America Online. An alternative is to simply delete the SPAM addressed to the second e-mail address when needed.
Try SPAM-free sites
It should be noted that such precautions are not necessary on the Southern Council of Optometry's popular Optcomlist, users groups or Meeting Street chat rooms. The Optcomlist is an e-mail discussion group that runs off an e-mail robot. I am the moderator and the only person who's ever seen or will see the list of addresses contained there. This list will never be sold or published.
Meeting Street, the busy chat room hosted on the Optcom Web site (www.optcom.com), also poses no risk. The system asks you to create a new ID and password that is unrelated to your e-mail address. No need to worry here.
Dealing with existing junk
What can you do if you're already receiving junk e-mail?
The initial response of many people when receiving junk e-mail is to hit the "reply" button and send off a blistering response. This is controversial. Most authorities believe you should not do this, because most messages never reach their destination due to erroneous "from" fields in the original message.
If your reply does make it back to the SPAM creator, however, it will either be ignored or used to confirm that your e-mail address is valid. That's right, sending back a reply validates that your e-mail address works.
You can send a complaint to the "postmaster" of the domain from which the junk e-mail came, but this can be difficult to do. Most of the headers in the junk e-mail will have been altered to hide the real source of the mail. If you're an AOL user, try sending a copy of the message to screen name TOSspam. This is a support account that supposedly maintains a list of abusive domains and filters them out.
Filter e-mails
While it's easy to do, changing your e-mail address may not be a good idea, especially if you have distributed the address to friends and colleagues. Even with America Online's ability to change screen names, you're out of luck if your primary screen name is the one that has landed on the junk mailers lists because you can't change your primary screen name on AOL. There are other ways around the problem.
While getting a second address won't get you off any lists you're already on, it will keep you off additional lists. This works only if you regularly use this address for all activities except your important personal mail.
For non-AOL members, another option is to set up filters in your e-mail client. Popular e-mail programs such as Eudora, Pegasus and e-mail Connection will allow such filtering. You can set these filters to scan each message as it is downloaded into your POP mailbox.
An example would be to set up a filtering rule to detect all messages that contain the "$" symbol in the subject line. Most messages that contain this symbol are chain letters, multi-level marketing schemes or other scams. You can tell the filter what to do with these messages. Pegasus, for example, will allow your filters to automatically move these messages into another message folder or even delete them.
You may have to work a while to set up enough filters to effectively get SPAM out of your way. It isn't difficult, but it does require a client that allows such filtering. America Online users are in a bit of a fix here because the e-mail section of AOL software does not allow for effective filtering.
SPAM and family members
How can you prevent your kids or other family members from being placed on these junk e-mail lists? The methods mentioned earlier still apply.
If this is not reasonable, then try to keep your kids out of public chat rooms and forums. On America Online, encourage your kids to use internal messages to "chat" with friends instead of a private chat room. Yes, private chat rooms are private, but you have to go through the public lobbies to get there.
America Online does have parental controls that allow you to turn off your child's ability to go to any chat rooms or offensive Web sites. I have tried to be lenient with my kids, because the controls sometimes limit too much what kids can do.
Change your child's screen name often. This will help. Kids don't tend to deal with very many people online. If your child will keep a list of friends that he or she exchanges e-mail with, it's a simple matter to let them all know of the address changes when needed.
Although junk e-mail is no fun to deal with, don't let it dissuade you from participating with the rapidly growing optometric online community. I feel strongly that the benefits of the Internet for kids also far outweigh the risks. Just be cautious, because despite junk e-mail, the Internet is a wonderful place for you, your staff and your family to communicate and to learn.
For Your Information:
- Walter A. Mayo, OD, is founder of the Optometric Computing home page (http://www.optcom.com/) and a charter member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Primary Care Optometry News. He can be reached at Coastal Eye Group, 400 Marina Drive, PO Drawer L, Georgetown, SC 29442; (803) 546-8421; fax: (803) 546-1173; e-mail: waltmayo@aol.com. Dr. Mayo has no direct financial interest in any of the products mentioned in this article, nor is he a paid consultant for any company mentioned.