Young hot girls new site! Make money while you sleep!! Your law school diploma is ready!!! Here's my pic :)!!!! Don't worry, I can help you ...PLEASE!!!!! Sound familiar? If so, you've been spammed, like every Netizen in the universe.
Spam mails - named after a long-forgotten (except by aficionados) Monty Python sketch, are the automatic emails sent out by the million by robot programs, offering everything from paid pornography to jobs sending more spam.
They have three things in common: they're in it for the money, they're utterly indiscriminate, and they arouse more hatred than any other inanimate object.
Should we worry? Yes. Spam may seem harmless - after all you can just hit the delete key without reading the things. But look at what happened to Usenet.
Usenet is the interlinked system of newsgroups on every subject which grew out of the bulletin boards that predated the Internet. They allowed enthusiasts worldwide to contact each other with messages on every conceivable subject. But Usenet has increasingly been swamped by automatic messages, to the extent that in some areas six in every 10 messages are spam, and humans are retreating from Usenet, leaving the spambots to talk among themselves. Internet for Dummies author John Levine writes on his spam.abuse.net page that all spam is bad, because it is all dishonest, and worthless. "The spam messages I've seen have almost without exception advertised stuff that's worthless, deceptive, and partly or entirely fraudulent," Levine writes. "Spammers know that people don't want to hear from them, and generally put fake return addresses on their messages so that they don't have to bear the cost of receiving responses from people to whom they've sent messages. Whenever possible, they use `disposable' trial Internet Software Provider (ISP) accounts so the ISP bears the cost of cleaning up after them."
Spambots, the programs that send out the messages, use spamdomains, specialised Internet domains which exist only for the purpose. But people are increasingly wise to this trick, and are using the filter options on their email programs to file spam in the trash. Now the spambots are spoofing, using real addresses to send their mail. Incensed with yet another mail offering me the answer to cancer, I filtered out all mail from earthlink.com last week. I didn't realise that I was filtering out hundreds of thousands of genuine users - or that Earthlink had its own problems with spam.
According to PC World News Radio (www.pcworld.com) last March 30th, Sanford Wallace's company Cyber Promotions has agreed to pay EarthLink $2 million, and stop spamming EarthLink's 450,000 members. If Wallace or Cyber Promotions breaks the agreement, Sanford Wallace will be held personally liable for $1 million. Wallace, the 28-year-old president and founder of Cyber Promotions, who has now turned his skills to aid the legislators, once aimed to be the one-stop junk mail source on the Net, sending millions of emails a day. Crusading engineer Paul Vixie has compiled a "black hole" list of 100 ISPs (Internet Service Providers) who allow spam through their systems; other ISPs may then refuse to carry the mail routed through these ISPs.
Some individuals use their own email filters creatively. "I don't know why I never thought of this before," wrote a subscriber to one maillist last week, "but last night it dawned on me that a large percentage of spam messages come through with nothing in the FROM field. It is typically blank.
"So I set up a mail action to move all messages to a spam folder that have a blank FROM field in the mail header," he gloated. "Works pretty good too..." He didn't, note, send the mail straight to the trash, because occasionally a genuine maillist may use a blank FROM field, or it could be mail from a friend who's trying out the Net and hasn't got the hang of it yet. So you can check the folder before trashing the messages.
It is always a good idea to notify your own ISP when spam arrives, and ask for the spamdomain to be banned or, if it's not from a spamdomain, for the spam to be traced back and its host ISP requested to refuse service to a spamming subscriber in future.
Daniel Janal, author of The Online Marketing Handbook, lists 10 ways to nuke spam on his webpage www.janal.com, which include keeping separate public and private email accounts, a method which was also suggested to me by an Indigo techie. You have a public alias, which you use for any maillists you may subscribe to, and keep your private email address for friends and business.
This works because the spambots are linked to other automatic programs which check postings to email maillists, newsgroups and material archived on the Web. So if the spambots get your maillist name, you can ditch it without losing business contacts.
He also warns against responding to spam - many of the automatic mailings offer an "unsubscribe" option: "just reply to this to say take me off the list". Never, ever, do. It's just a way to confirm that you got and opened the mail. And Janal says not to try to flood the spammers mailbox. "Chances are they closed the account after they sent the mail."
If you have your own webpage, beware. Spambots roam around sniffing out business email addresses from webpages. So if you have a "mailto" on your page, try to disguise the address so that it's obvious to humans but spambots can't work out the syntax, e.g. mailto:%20name@domain.com.
One US company, IXKS, has found a novel way to deal with spam, which may or may not work - they send a message to the spammer notifying it of a charge of $100 for reading the mail, and saying that any reply will be taken as acceptance of the contract. The mail lists the name and land address of the firm sending the spam, says a collection agency will be used, and ends with a cheery "Again, thank you for your business!"
It's currently all to play for in the legislation stakes. Various US lawmakers have legislation at different stages which attempts to stop spam without also stamping on the cherished American tradition of free speech.
On May 12th the US Senate unanimously passed a law which makes sending commercial mail without accurate identification of the company's address and 'phone number punishable by a fine of up to $15,000; the bill now goes forward to Congress. (The anti-spam site at www.ecofuture.org /ecofuture has useful updates on legislation.)
Wired News (www.hotwired.com) reported that the aforementioned Sanford Wallace would be a witness in two cases, the first on alleged "spoofing" or forging of postmaster.uk.co, the domain name for Bibliotech, described as Europe's premier free email company, the second on behalf of Continental Investment Corp, a publicly traded company whose stock Wired said "was touted in emails purportedly distributed from the Harvard Equity Research company".
The results of the cases, and the fate of legislation against spammers could be the only thing that protects the Internet as a business medium. We live, as the Chinese proverb has it, in interesting times.