Lemonbiscuit

Spam is an unnecessary and annoying blight on online communications, but with a few simple rules to follow, you should find that you can work around it quite easily, and perhaps even reduce your exposure to spam.

Learn about your foe

The first step to defeating any foe is to understand their motives. If you do your best to avoid the traps laid out by them you will prevail.

There are 4 motives behind spam to avoid:

• Email address validation - is there a real person at the end of this address.
• Trying to sell you something - usually providing a link
• Spreading a virus - pleading you to open a dangerous attachment
• Phishing - asking for your financial details, usually disguised as requests from banks or from people offering large sums of money

And here's how to respond to the arsenal:

• You should never view images in spam, reply to it or click any links in it, this will instantly alert the sender that you have actually read the mail.
• You should never click any links to buy products, this identifies you and helps rate you as a potential target.
• You should never open attachments unless you know what they are and where they are coming from. Viruses can appear to come from people you know. Always run up to date antivirus software.
• No legitimate financial service provider will ever ask you to click a link in an email to fill out your financial details, they simply don't forget that kind of stuff (no matter what the email says).

If you're wondering how they got your address in the first place, you'll probably find that your email address is on the internet somewhere. Google can sometimes help you find the culprit. Otherwise they may have just guessed it.

Filtering

If you've had the same address, and a web site up and running for a while, chances are you're getting a load of spam by now (we receive hundreds per day here, so you're probably getting off lightly.

Filtering spam is a pretty useful practise, and various systems exist to help to filter out spam. Normally this is on a scoring system based on key words and phrases in the email. Additionally, these systems tend to use a 'blacklist' service to identify hosts that have been known to send spam in the past and block them. This is not by itself a reliable means to block spam and will result in a large number of false positives. Many people share mail servers through their ISP's or hosting providers, so if one user breaks the rules, everyone using that server suffers.

Fighting spam gets more effective at the mail client, since you have more controls at your disposal. The spam filter can then learn as you receive emails which are good and which are not, based on how you teach it. You'll still receive the spam, but it will go into a 'Spam' folder on your mail client.

Recommendations for filtering on the mail client

Mozilla Thunderbird

Thunderbird is a well established and powerful email client provided by the team that brought Mozilla, and Firefox to the world. This has integrated spam filtering that works extremely well.

Outlook + SpamBayes

Spambayes is a free Outlook plugin that once installed adds a few buttons to your Outlook toolbar. You simply train it as you go along. It's rubbish at first, but after it has learned about 20 samples of spam and good emails, it really does get quite effective at recognising it.

Outlook Express

Last time I checked, there are no plugins for spam filtering on outlook express, and no integrated support for it. It's a lousy client and shouldn't be used. It simply attempts to increase security by excessively blocking attachments in emails. If you're using OE, switch to Thunderbird, that's the best answer I have for you.