Trash those spammers

By Uthpala Gunethilake

So it was particularly disheartening to discover that there is much more to an e-mail account besides receiving and sending mail. Apparently, knowing the basics is just not enough to survive with an e-mail account. What do you do with mail which you neither want to receive nor reply to?

I was baffled and annoyed when I received a message from an unknown entity that he (or she) can help reduce my debts and another message from a similar species that he or she knows the fastest way to get an MBA. Now I never had any debts worth getting rid of nor did I ever aspire to get an MBA. I hit the delete button promptly, and with force.

But the unknown entities simply refused to take the hint. Their messages kept coming and before long I discovered that there is an army of unknown entities out there whose sole purpose is to annoy the life out of e-mail users like me. 'Spam' is what their game is called officially, and spam ranges from annoying to offensive to the purely unprintable. 

Spam is big business in cyberspace. It has become a solid part of Internet with its own politics, and there are legions of anti-spam activists who - sick of having to spend five minutes every time they check mail in trashing irritable and unwanted messages - are fighting against well organised armies of spammers. There are many sites and organisations devoted to spamming and anti-spamming, legislations being drafted to control spam and a lawsuit is pending between a spammer and an Internet Service Provider (ISP). What's more, there is even an online archive and gallery of spam begun by a profuse receiver of junkmail, 'in order to save spam and junkmail for future web users'.

Defined as 'unsolicited mail', junkmail is simply unwanted mail that range from chain letters and credit dealings to virus warnings and pornography. At the light end of spam may be one of your own jobless friends, who keeps sending chain letters from an address unknown to you. But on the other hand it may be a spammer from an organised site whose chosen vocation is to plague e-mail users by clogging their inboxes. 

Anti-spam activists argue that spam is ethically wrong, since it intrudes upon privacy, time as well as server and disk storage space and since it is simply a misuse of facilities. "Junkmail is the Internet version of nuisance calls", says Navindri. "Up to a certain point it may be fun, but there has to be a line drawn somewhere. It's pretty annoying when you keep on getting the same message for days on end, and sometimes deleting takes so much time," she adds.

Spammers use a number of ways to pick up your e-mail address and picking it up from chat rooms, bulletin boards or websites you have visited are just a few. There are also a number of ways that you can use to get rid of pursuant spammers. If junkmail becomes a menace, first of all turn to your service provider; many Internet Service Providers have policies against spammers and measures to help users side-step the junk mail problem.

You can easily opt out of mailing lists which these companies provide to other companies. This means (though it doesn't help now) that you could have avoided receiving via e-mail, reams of political manifestos which took ages to download in the last few weeks. Says Sheyenne Algama, Assistant Manager (Direct Sales) of Eureka On-line, "We send product information from certain companies to our customers, but if they don't want to receive them, if they notify us, we stop it."

"Also, if you find that you want to get rid of your online subscriptions to various companies, they usually give the option of withdrawing," adds Sheyenne. 

Free e-mail services like Yahoo and Hotmail also have detailed instructions about what you can do to stop getting bombarded by spam. These include filtering, blocking and complaining to the sender's server, or service provider. Opting out of directories maintained by on-line services is also another measure. 

What this makes clear is that there are many more ways of preventing spam than grinding your teeth and hitting the delete button over and over again. Maybe you will not see a complete end to the menace, but at least you'll have a cleaner inbox than you used to have.
Spam don'ts

1. Never respond to a spam e-mail.- For a spammer, one 'hit' among thousands of mailings is enough to justify the practice.

2. Never sign up with sites that promise to remove your name from spam lists.- These sites are of two kinds; sincere and spam address collectors. The first kind of site is ignored or sometimes exploited by spammers, the second is owned by them.

3. Never mail-bomb spam sites or engage in hacking to stop spammers. - This only increases the amount of wasted Internet traffic and makes the Internet even less reliable than it is.

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