SPAM, SPAM, GO AWAY...

by Sanya Oloruntoba

First Published in PCWorld West Africa Edition

February 2003

I get an average of 100 emails daily and nearly half of them are spam. The most annoying thing about spam is the time it wastes in deleting it from my inbox and  the fact that it disrupts my life and kills the joy and convenience of using email at home and  in the office. I reckon that I spend not less than ten hours a month cleaning up. In the halcyon days of the Internet there were no spam or viruses and it was a joy to send and receive emails. Then spam started coming and now my built-in filters can't cope. It looks as if the spammers are getting bolder and aim to take over the whole of my mailboxes with their endless special offers, get rich quick schemes, cure-all remedies and pornographic junk. In annoyance, a few months ago, I resolved to fight back. I have succeed to a large extent in the battle, but I also learnt in the process that there is a lot more for email users to do individually and collectively to fight spam, otherwise, no matter what, spam won't go away completely. If you are a victim of spammers like me, this article may help you.

What Is Spam?

Spam is actually another name for the “luncheon meat” we use in making sandwiches for lunch or for picnics! How the name came to be applied to junk mails, sent out in bulk by some inconsiderate people, is not very clear. But it is certainly now a generic term for any intrusion people don't like. Generally, spam email is defined as an unsolicited commercial bulk mailing. Spam falls into two categories. The first is the bulk emails that marketers use legitimately to reach potential customers. The second are similar bulk emails that spammers use to sell goods or services and to spread vice, as in the case of pornographic spam.

Let me give more examples. We are all familiar with the so-called Nigerian Letters or the “419” Letters that are emailed out in thousands to people around the world with the sole intent of duping them. That is hard-core illegal spam! On the other hand, I get lots of emails daily from marketers trying to sell me goods and services like holiday travel packages and household appliances, at bargain prices. Such emails become spamming when they are sent repeatedly without regard for my convenience. On the whole the dividing line between genuine email and spam is disappearing. That is bad news for genuine email marketers and sad for businesses around the world. It is reported that the US and Europe are losing about $11.4billion annually from spam. If this trend continues Internet users may soon agree to support legislations that sought to make bulk emailing illegal.

Why Spam Won’t Go Away

Why has spam become so pervasive? You may ask. It is because the use of email has grown and created a huge global market of billions of users. Spammers took advantage of this for distributing spam because there are no regulations for handling emails and it costs very little to setup and use an email account. Consequently, spamming has now become a lucrative business. For instance, if a spammer can send a million spam emails monthly and makes only 1% hit, he could make a living from that and even become rich in a short time with little or no capital outlay. That is the incentive that drives spammers whose ambitions are to own millions of new email addresses for pushing out their daily spam.

Stop-Spam Software

As in real life, the virtual world is full of people that are always ready to offer solutions to Internet problems. The plethora of "Stop-Spam" software in the market today, supports this contention. Primarily, most email clients offer some built-in email filters, even though many of them don't work satisfactorily. Filters depend mainly on the rules you set for them. Spammers analyze, learn these rules, and construct their spam to defeat the filters. In addition to built-in filters there are scores of stand-alone spam filters that target thousands of known spammers. They go by different names but they all do the same thing basically. They check new message headers in your email against a blacklist or database of known spammers’ domain names and subject lines to detect spam. Although the more sophisticated ones use pattern-matching techniques to filter out spam, I found that existing spam filters generally couldn't cope adequately with the antics of spammers who now use sophisticated software to generate thousands of fake names and subject lines to keep one step ahead of filters. That is one more reason why spam will not away easily.

In spite of all the unreliability of filters, there are a few that do excellent jobs in stopping spam. I have tried iHateSpam and Spam Buster and think they are good, even though they can’t filter all the spam I get. Lastly, I have had a close look at the junk mail filter in my MSN Hotmail that offers three levels of filtration for spam. Let’s look at all these solutions to see how they could help.

iHateSpam

This is one of the best spam filters in the market today. iHateSpam is made specifically for Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express. It will not work with other email clients like Eudora and IncrediMail but a version for AOL is promised soon. Once iHateSpam is installed, incoming email is analyzed against its spam indicators or blacklist to determine if the message is spam. Suspicious emails are then placed in a special "quarantine" folder in the user's email folders.  In the Outlook Express version, they are placed in the deleted

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emails  folder and are marked in red. To reduce the risk of classifying legitimate email as spam, iHateSpam optionally builds a list of acceptable senders (friends) and also allows

own list of senders from whom no email will be accepted (enemies). Emails from such "enemies" get quarantined just like spam! You can download a free trial version from www.sunbelt.software.com. A  registered version costs $30 and this includes software for both Outlook and Outlook Express, which can be run on the same PC.

Spam Buster

Another popular email filtering tools around is Spam Buster. It includes filters for more than 20,000 known spammers. It can run from your system tray and access your server to check your email message headers. If it finds a spam, it marks it for deletion. If not sure, it puts a question mark against it and gives you an opportunity to mark the doubtful one for deletion or send it to the exceptions list.

Spam Buster supports most POP3 email accounts. The setup and configurations are simple. The Settings icon, shown in Figure 1, opens a series of dialog boxes that allows you to enter your POP3 account name, choose your default mailer and opt for manual or automatic operation. Once you are online and click the Check email icon, the program will start its job. If you are new to the program, you should opt for manual operation, which gives you control over what is deleted or not from the server. Later, when you are familiar with the program, you may opt for the automatic check and deletion that is much faster. Besides, you need to teach the program what to delete and what to let through and that will take a couple of weeks to accomplish properly. Spam Buster is available in two versions – the free advert-supported version and a paid version without ad-banners. You can download a copy from www.contactplus.com.

MSN Hotmail

Of all the web-based emails I have tried, Hotmail has the best built-in filter. It gives you a choice of three levels of filtration - Default, Enhanced and Exclusive. In the default level, obvious junk mail is caught. In the enhanced level, most junk mail is caught. In the exclusive level you will only receive email from your Contacts or from names on your safe list. Figure 2 shows the Hotmail’s Junk Mail Filter Options.

Learning To Fight Spam

Filters can’t stop all spam. You’ve got to supplement them with common sense and learn to fight spam that won’t go away. Here are a few points to help you.

1. The snag in spam filters that are set to default, enhanced, exceptions or exclusive levels of filtration, is that all too often they block genuine emails from reaching their recipients. Therefore, if you use such filters, you should check your junk mail folder regularly to make sure wanted email has not been moved there. I have lost some genuine emails that way but I think it is a little price to pay for keeping the bulk of the spam away.

2. In subscribing to newsletters, or when shopping online, you are often asked to tick a box that will enable affiliates to send you special offers. Emails coming from such affiliates should be genuine but surprisingly they are often spamming, suggesting that my email address had been shared. Nowadays, I say NO when asked to accept offers from affiliated vendors. The fewer the people who know your email address, the better your protection against spam.

3. Safeguard your email addresses and your passwords, especially for your web-based email accounts. The spammer's goal is to get around your filters. He can do this easily by forwarding his spam emails through your email addresses without your knowledge if he is in possession of your passwords. 

4. Learn how to identify a spammer. A simple way to do this is to look at his email headers. Email messages are passed over the Internet from one computer to another in order to get to the final destination. The header contains detailed routing information and you’ll find useful clues to the source host there. To access the email header in Outlook Express, for example, highlight the spam sender’s nickname or email address and right click your mouse to open the content menu. Scroll down to Properties and click. The email header and message source will be displayed.

5. Don’t respond to spam email. Instead, if you want a product that is advertised in a spam email, go to the website that sells the product to find out more. Never respond to a spammer’s email instructions to remove your name from his list by replying with the word "remove." This is just a trick to get you to reveal that your address is real. By replying, your address is given a high premium and placed on more lists and you'll get more spam.

Email has become a mission-critical service at home and in business. As a corporate or home user you cannot afford to seat back and allow spammers to take over your mailboxes. You should join in the fight against spam and the best way to start is to invest in effective spam filter software. If Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express are your favourite mailers and you have $30 to spare, invest it on iHateSpam. It will pay for itself quickly by automatically deleting your spam. If what you want is a free stuff that will work with your pop3 email accounts, get the ad-supported Spam Buster. Its ad-banners are unobtrusive and it will do a nice job busting your spam. 

Whatever you do, remember that until better email spam detecting software are developed, and until all PC users unite against spam, we can only reduce this nuisance to a tolerable level in our emails at present. Like the rain in the nursery rhyme "Rain, Rain, Go Away..." it is wishful thinking that spam will go away easily without us fighting it!

Note: The screen-shot figures have been disabled.