This short guide has the intention to provide even new users with an easy way to enjoy the internet. A big problem that stands between the enjoyment is mail spam or simply spam. Once you create a email adress you will sooner or later encounter emails that promise you fortunes, penis enlargements (even for women) and lots of hot chicks who want to meet you. This soon gets very annoying, this guide tries to get rid of most of the spam with some simple measures.
a. Email client
Spam is not a matter of the email client. Its still reasonable to choose a client that fits your purpose. Some weeks ago we found out that most of the our authors are using different email clients, while none was using outlook (express). My advice would be to choose a email client other than outlook, there are lots of free ones available, for example.
Foxmail
Popcorn - (freeware supports one account profile)
Mozilla Thunderbird
YAMC-Yet Another Mail Client
Phoenix Mail
i.Scribe
b. Spam prevention
There are lots of ways to get rid of most of the spam and even prevent that your email adresses are collected by the spammers.
1. Don´t publish your email adress on the net, if you have to publish it use a form that most spam collectors dont recognice, for example instead of writing admin@deny.de write admin (at) deny.de without making it a link. you could also use a form mailer which hides your email adress.
2. If you subscribe to certain services dont use your real email adress that your friends write to, basically you have two choices. Create a email adress simply for the purpose to subscribe to certain services on the net. You could use free email services like
Gmx
Yahoo
or others, choose as you like.
If you want to subscribe to a service where you recieve a “confirm your registration” email but never recieve a email again from this service you could also use the following service.
Grensloth
Jetable
Mailinator
Spam.la
Spamspot
there is a big list of additional services available here
When the service you want to subscribe to asks for a valid email adress enter anything you like in the form (for mailinator.com in this case, check the website for instructions)
“youchoosethistext”@mailinator.com
Then switch to the mailinator website and enter “youchoosethistext” in the form field at the front page. You then see all mails that the user “youchoosethistext” recieved for the last hours. The mail from your service should be there and you can simply read and reply to finish your registration. The advantage is of course that the email adress you instantly created will be gone after a few hours, leaving no traces of your real email addy or your identity. (just for the record, the mailinator guys of course have your ip adress)
BUT, you should be aware that everyone is able to check the email for user “youchoosethistext”. So, if you registered at a forum like deny and people can see your email adress (”youchoosethistext”@mailinator.com) they simply can order the forum to send out your password again to your email adress and check at mailinator.com for that adress and recieve your password. That means, make sure that no one is able to see your email adress at the site.
3.Lets assume you already recieve lots of spam but you cant change your email adresses. You could choose to use a program that blocks the spam before it is recieved in your email client. A program that basically sits between your client and the server of your email provider and checks all incoming mail wether its spam or not.
The best program for this purpose is in my opinion
Spamahilator
I did a test of some spamblocking programs and came to the conclusion that spamahilator is simply the best, its fast, it blocks about 99% of all spam without configuration.
Some of its functions are
- block certain words, you can edit, add, delete words
- block certain domains, allow domains to send
- block attachments of a certain type
- learn while recieving
- added functionality with plugins
Its really easy to configure and to maintain.
Other programs worth mentioning.
MailWasher – Shareware
G-Lock SpamCombat – Freeware
4. Email checkers
Problem with many new, modern worms is obvious: they gotta be downloaded by the mail client. Some of them (attachments) don’t even need to be run to start a nasty job thx of using OE exploits, so the message download an be dangerous.
Email checkers work in another way, they send a command only to get a number of stored new messages, some of them additionaly retrieve subject lines of such messages, so it doesn’t harm in any way user’s computer.
CheckP3
GetMail
Mailchecker32
Thats all you need to know and do to prevent most of the spam on the net, fairly easy isn´t it ?
5. Filtering mail from spammers
Some anti spam programs are able to filter incoming mail that is send by mail adresses that are known to send pam. Internet Databases collect those adresses and provide lists containing them. Some programs allow to import this lists so you dont have to add all ips manually.
Beware though, that adding a list might also filter out mail that you want to recieve, if you want to add a list make sure to check it first before adding it.
Great listing of databases:
http://www.declude.com/Articles.asp?ID=97
Additional Information can be obtained:
Combat Spam
Spamfaq