Tool Box
Issue No. 11 - June/July 2003
e-culture
How to 'foil' the Spammers
by Kenneth Doyle
In many ways the true wonder of the Internet is email. It’s now part of the culture, just like mobile phones, wide screen television and video players. Business uses email as an efficient low-cost communication tool. When people exchange information they now ask, “What’s your email address”?
In some circles if you don’t have an email address you’re considered to be a member of the techno-impoverished. Even Grandparents now attend leisure classes to learn how to use email.
Email technology has been developed to the point where it can send sound and even high quality video. The number of emails being sent around the world on a daily basis is just staggering. Three years ago AOL America technology delivered 30 million emails every day. Who knows what those numbers are today?
And then in the middle of this bright shining, technological light there’s this other “thing”. It arrives in our email program in-boxes daily. It’s not requested, and sometime it’s offensive. It’s SPAM.
How does it get there, and more importantly how can we stop it?
As research for this article I had 3 business colleagues collect their SPAM for three weeks to identify the patterns and sources of their SPAM. They collected just under 3,000 emails in three weeks between them. In general we found that the pattern in SPAM topics were related to sexual prowess, promises of debt reduction, products to help you grow young, drug prescriptions, and off the shelf University degrees.
How does the SPAM find us?
Well, that’s the 3 million dollar question? Essentially it goes something like this. “If you have an email address on any website, or in any publicly accessible place on the Internet you’re a candidate for SPAM.”
Enter the spider…
Anything can be bought for a price, and clever programmers develop programs that spider web sites to get your email addresses. These email addresses are then bundled up as col...
