I am getting an increasing amount of spam, how can I stop this?
Over recent years unsolicited email has become an increasing problem that is proving difficult to resolve due to the nature of the protocols that carry out the transfer of email. When Post Office Protocol (POP) and Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) were devised the concept of spam did not exist, therefore the protocols made no provisions to deal with it.
There have been many attempts to eradicate spam with varying degrees of success, however the spammers work equally hard at finding work-a-rounds for any blocking or filtering techniques. A more aggressive stance taken by some ISPs and system administrators is to blacklist certain mailservers and/or IP ranges by refusing to accept or deliver mail from them. This unfortunately can sometimes affect legitimate users.
A lot of spam is sent from compromised machines, scripts or through open relay mailservers which do not necessarily have anything to do with the spamers. Trying to track down the true originator/sender of the spam proves impossible in most cases or a futile exercise, even if you do manage to get them blacklisted they just move on to a different server and start again.
Recently there have been some attempts in the US and Europe to legislate against the sending of unsolicited/spam email, but due to the global nature of the Internet unless every country participates its effectiveness will be minimal.
The following steps can help to reduce the number of spam emails you receive:
- Choose carefully who you give your email address to i.e. do you think the company or website you are giving your address to is reputable?
- Is your email address publicly available? e.g. email link on your website. If so does it need to be? could it become a feedback form instead?
- Make sure your Anti Virus protection is always kept up-to-date
- Make your email address a specific alias rather than a catchall which gets anything sent to your domain.
- Try installing some spam filtering software such as SpamPal (Windows) Spam Assassin (Linux)