Un-happy birthday to SPAM!

Last week marked the 30th birthday of the first spam message being sent. It was sent on 1st May 1978 by Gary Thuerk, a marketing representative at the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) to around 400 users of ARPANET, the US government-run computer network that evolved into the Internet.

The message was met with an immediate negative reaction, with many recipients complaining directly to Thuerk who made no attempt to hide his identity. DEC was also reprimanded by the ARPANET administrators.

Chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Brad Templeton documents the original message and many replies on his website. These can be viewed here.

According to Templeton spam got its name from a the television show “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” in which a group of Vikings in a restaurant that serves all of its food with spam tinned meat sing a song repeating the word spam. “Thus, the meaning of the term at least: something that keeps repeating and repeating to great annoyance,” says Templeton.

Spam continues to annoy Internet users, with Sophos research revealing that 92.3 percent of all email was spam during the first quarter of 2008.

“Users are always just a click away from spam – from weight loss medications to drugs used to improve sexual performance, spam is a burden on all of us,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. “What’s worse is that a lot of spam is deliberately malicious today, aiming to steal your bank account information or install malware. People who buy goods sold via spam are merely perpetuating the problem of junk email for all users and must be stopped.”

“Gary Thuerk could never have imagined what he was starting when he sent that mass email 30 years ago. There is a generation of people today who have never worked in a world without spam clogging up their inboxes,” continued Cluley. “The internet community needs to do what it can to make sure that spam doesn’t celebrate a 40th or 50th birthday. That means educating the public about never buying goods sold via spam. If you receive an unsolicited email message advertising goods to you – don’t buy, don’t try, don’t reply.”

My 10 quick tips for stopping spam

1. Delete your catch-all email address. Catch-all’s are generic mail boxes that collect all email not sent to a specific alias. The upside of catch-alls is if someone spells an email address incorrectly, then the email will still be received by the catch-all recipient. The downside is that spammers send emails to randomaliases@yourdomain.com, this is known as dictionary attack, where they make up a random alias and sent it to your domain. By removing your catch-all email account you will stop a majority of junk messages.
2. Don’t use single names i.e. joe@yourdomain.com for your email addresses. These addresses can be easily be guessed. Instead use firstname.surname@yourdomain.com, which makes it virtually impossible for spammers to guess your address.
3. Don’t use sales@yourdomain.com or support@yourdomain.com or any other easily guessable addresses. Instead come up with something a little more creative and harder for spammers to guess e.g. uksales@yourdomain.com or supportteam@yourdomain.com.
4. If you’re sending the latest joke or funny mpeg to friends or colleagues, don’t use TO or CC. You never know who these emails will be forwarded to and often end up in the hands of spammers, with the end result of everyone you listed as an original recipient being added to the spammers. What makes this worse is that not only are the original recipients easily visible, but also the subsequent chain(s) of people.
5. Take the time to create different email addresses for different uses e.g. one for business use, one for personal and another one for online shopping. You can then avoid the risk of exposing a single email address every contact.
6. Don’t list email addresses on your own web site in plain text. Spammers use automated robots to capture these addresses and add them to their spam databases. Either use a contact form instead of listing email addresses or use an email cloaking script. You can search on Google for “email cloaking” and you will get lots of links to scripts you can use.
7. Use a throwaway email address when posting to public forums, chat rooms and on instant messenger accounts. Only use your main personal/business email addresses to communicate with trusted sources.
8. Never reply to a spam you receive or click the “unsubscribe” link. That only lets the spammer know that your address exists.
9. Do not purchase anything from a spam email received. Not only might it be a scam, but by purchasing something you are letting spammers know that your email address is active and that you buy from spammers. Your address will then be sold to masses of other spammers.
10. Finally, use you DELETE key. If everyone resisted the temptation to reply to a spammer and not buy from them, then we would live in a spam free world. So just try hard to ignore and delete.

Following these quick tips could reduce your SPAM by as much as 90%!

LCN future plans to help combat spam

I have always been very conscious that we have yet to offer a spam filtering solution for our customers. I have seen the vast amount of requests we receive from customers, asking how they can reduce the amount of spam they are getting. I understand how frustrating spam can be and I can assure you that combating spam is very high on the LCN agenda.

Over the years we have investigated and tried many different spam filtering solutions and up until now we have never managed to find a solution that we have felt is up to required standard. However, over the past 6 months we have worked very closely with a leading spam filtering company to develop our own tailor made solution which we believe is perfect for the job and can offer a 99% reduction in spam received.

Our spam filtering solution is currently being beta-tested and we hope to have this rolled out into production in the coming months.

Once live we will make an announcement via our newsletter.

References

Brad Templeton – templetons.com
Graham Cluley – sophos.com