Here Comes SPAM...

By Irina

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I exercise regularly and follow a healthy diet. My weight is right on money. So every invitation "to loose 30 pounds in 20 days" insults more than just my intelligence and literary taste. Yet until now I managed to treat Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE) or simply SPAM as a nuisance that wastes my time and resources, but does not represent a serious problem. Not any more!

The message that changed my attitude looked rather innocent: "Hello [fname], I am so-and-so. You are receiving this message because I saw your online business site..." The next day I got another similar message from different so-and-so. Soon, number escalated to a dozen a day. Very disturbing was also fact that messages were arriving to my "strictly business" email addresses reserved exclusively for my customers and business partners. A little research quickly revealed name of my new enemy - Spam Bot.

Spam Bot is much like a search engine spider. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week it crawls from page to page looking for email addresses. Even single Spam Bot is able to quickly produce huge list of addresses (only addresses - that's why they called me [fname]!) which are used to send SPAM. Unfortunately, there are many of them... Another problem is that being extremely easy to generate and thus very cheap, these lists are sold and re-sold over and over again to naïve (obtuse?) "netrepreneurs".

Looks like a serious self-perpetuating problem for anyone with business email address posted on Internet. Is there a solution? Well, yes - you can completely eliminate this type of SPAM by making your email address unrecognizable for Spam Bots. Here are several possible approaches:

One of most annoying aspects of dealing with incoming email is spam mail (unsolicited email). It fills up your email box, takes up your precious time, and seems to only get worse. You may even delete your personal or business email that was mistaken for spam mail.

This could result in lost business to you.

In Part 2 of this article you will discover solutions to help you stop spam mail. This allows you to spend more time building a profitable business.

Apart from just hitting delete button each day here are some timesaving solutions:

1. Use filters or message rules of your email client.

a) In outlook express (since it is most popular email client) go to tools - message rules - mail - mail rules - new

b) Under "select conditions for your rule", check "where subject line contains specific words".

c) Under "select actions for your rule" check "delete it".

d) Under "rule description" click on "contains specific words" - enter words or phrases that you never wish to receive again.

e) Under "name of rule" provide an appropriate name for rule ie JUNK.

f) Click OK

Creating this JUNK rule will automatically delete emails containing specific words or phrases you entered.

There are many other rules you can apply (ie move certain messages to specific folders automatically), depending on what you need.

Here are a couple of web sites that list phrases and keywords frequently used in spam mail:

http://www.sv-cs.com/spam.html http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt8/spamfilter_phrases.htm

2. Use anti-spam software.

You can install software either on your computer (client side) or on your web host (server side).