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Dealing with Spam and Email Privacy
Today, Email remains the number one communication tool - exceeding
all postal mail and telephone calls per day by a factor of 10. Email
is simply the way the world communicates today. But with the growing
adoption of email over the past decade it has come at the expense of
lost time sifting through tons of spam mails in your mailbox. Today,
it feels more like a game of chance at a casino when you expose your
personal email address through online orders or web message postings.
There is no single best solution to solve unwanted email (SPAM) but several
clever strategies and technologies have evolved that let you continue to
use email as a reliable and effective means of communication, while
minimizing time and efforts for dealing with these dark sides of the
Internet community.
To place a www.viewtheip.com information box on your Web site, copy the following code to any Web page.
Two distinct approaches exist to fighting SPAM that
should be both considered and applied: Spam prevention and
filtering. Spam prevention means avoiding that your email address
gets into the wrong hands. Obviously, entering an email address into
dubious 'get rich quick', file sharing or pornographic sites is the most
efficient recipe for getting spammed. Filtering means using certain
'rules' and mathematical formulas to try to determine if a pending email is
legitimate or not. While newer technologies are developed every day, the
spammers develop new countermeasures shortly there after - making the fight
against spam a continuous cat and mouse race.
Spam Prevention
Spammers routinely harvest the Internet for websites with embedded
email addresses, so you might want to be cautious before including your
email addresses on any web pages.
When running a business you need public ways for your customers to
contact you - and not publishing your email address can often cause
someone to not make a purchase from you. Further, when you do publish
your email address and it eventually starts to get abused by spammers -
you later become forced to implement strict filtering to make your mail box
usable again. However, once you start filtering the email to say your
sales information mail box - you suddenly run the risk of accidentally
filtering a potential sale! To avoid such situations, it's
best to use a web page contact form to allow remote visitors to send
comments directly to you. This way you do not have to publish your email
address, but your potential customers have direct access to contact you online.
Another tool in spam prevention is using temporary email addresses for
certain correspondence. One fantastic and free service aptly named
HugeMail.com offers you the ability
to create customized 'timed' email accounts that expire after 30 days. For
instance if your email address was bob_williams@hugemail.com and you
were going to post on a web forum, you could use HugeMail.com's
customized 'timed' email accounts to create this 30 day expiration account of:
bob-dated-1174518698.21ce00@hugemail.com. Anyone who emails that new
customized email address will be able to reach you (since it forwards the emails
to your real address) for the next 30 days. After 30 days the bob-dated-1174518698.21ce00@hugemail.com
email account will bounce back all emails as 'mail box does not exist'. Spammers will not
be able to contact you using that 'throw away' date expired mail box by the time they
have harvested, and compiled that email account into their lists. All while protecting
your real personal email account, which you never had to expose. There are other
customized email features over at HugeMail.com such
as keyword, and friend lists - we can't state just how much we love this service you
should check them out.
Spam Filtering
Spam Filtering works by trying to automatically differentiate
between good and bad emails. Many factors can be used to determine
good vs bad, such as what IP address sent the email and was the originating
IP address located in a country known for lots of spam? Email headers
are closely examined (invalid domain names used in reply-to headers) can
be used to filter good vs bad, and so can the actual content of the email.
Phrases like "home mortgage" or "get rich quick" are sure to set off any
spam filter worth anything - however spammers adapt to all the newest technologies.
The latest trick is spammers send un-obtrusive email 'text' (no words like
mortgage, or web links, or anything a normal spam has) but instead they
attach a small image that has an advertisement (SPAM) waiting for you when
the email gets past your filters. Soon spam filters will get intelligent enough
to 'read' images and determine if its really your Aunt Sally sending photos
from last week's BBQ or if its a spammer sending you a photo of his new boat he
wants you to help pay for by clicking his advertisement. The important thing
to note with spam filtering, is that it never has been, nor will it ever be,
100% accurate. It will occasionally block a friendly email -and occasionally
let a spam email get through. Its more voodoo than science today in getting
your spam filter settings just right, and unfortunately that's not good enough
when you have small children using email.
One technology, that has come into its own recently is the more
advanced forms of sender verification (also known as Challenge Response Systems).
A challenge response system is when your mail box automatically challenges every
email that arrives from someone you haven't previously communicated with. The challenge
is in the form of an email back to them simply saying "Hello, My name is Bob, you tried
to email me but to ensure you really are who you say you are, simply click this link once
and I will add you to my address book and we can email each other without interruption".
When your friend clicks the link that you 'challenged' him with, his email is released from
quarantine and delivered to you - and your friend is added to your contact list (so he
never has to go through the challenge-response steps again). Since spammers are not human
and don't use real reply-to addresses, your challenge to them will go 'un answered' and
their spam will quietly rot away in the quarantine until its automatically purged
in a few weeks. This is as close as it gets to a 100% spam free way to get emails you
trust and want once people are on your contact list.
Here is a picture of how challenge response works
While this may sound rather complex, it really is quite simple but not offered by many
providers like google, aol, yahoo or hotmail. But fear not, check out the guys at
HugeMail.com as
they offer this Challenge Verification service for free! Challenge response email filtering
is a great way to close down spam for good.
Anonymous Email Accounts and Disposable Email Addresses (DEAs)
Today, many websites require you to leave an email address before they
allow you to download things or enter protected areas. It is a good idea to
have secondary email addresses just for the purpose of giving them to
websites that you do not trust 100%. Anonymous email addresses,
disposable email addresses (DEAs), or email boxes other
than your normal private email account, are ideal for these situations.
After creating multiple email addresses, you will soon discover that
managing them can be far more time consuming and cumbersome than
anticipated. Can you really be sure that all messages for your additional
identities can be safely ignored? Since many websites are trying to confirm
the existence of an email address by requiring you to respond to a
confirmation mail sent to the given address, you will end up wading through
tons of spam just to find the confirmation mail. While multiple email
addresses can help in managing spam you soon end up loosing just as much
time managing the email accounts.
Disposable email addresses promise to completely solve the unsolicited
mail problem, right? Well, these solutions do work, but have some serious
drawbacks. First of all, the process generating a disposable email account
requires some additional manual steps, at least visiting a website and
taking the time to setup a new account. Secondly, some large companies have
learned this trick too and reject all orders and signups from email accounts
associated with disposable email addresses. But most important is the fact
that by using this method of spam avoidance, you effectively opt out of
receiving any further mail from the addressee, so you are unreachable
even for emails that you would otherwise want to receive such as
a lost password recovery email. In effect, you cut yourself off from all
communication just because you hate to deal with unwanted emails. For many
that price is just too high.
The best answer and balance we have found dealing with many email accounts
is to have just 1 account at HugeMail.com
and use a combination of HugeMail's customized date email accounts with short
expiration times and customized revocable keyword email accounts. We have found
this provides the perfect balance between manging just 1 email box and
spammers not being able to harvest your real email address while always
keeping you communicating with those most important to you.
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