Minimizing Email Abuse from Spammers and Morons

[scott]

I recently received an email from a client frustrated that someone had used their email address to send fake emails to others. Unfortunately, with email today, there is absolutely no security built into the system, and anyone with a little knowledge can send an email to anyone using whatever address their dark little heart desires to use. Here is the email that I sent back with a little background on this as well as some tips on minimizing your exposure to email abuse.

Dear [Name Removed to Minimize Spam ],

Anyone with an email address can have this problem. Let me explain how this happens. There are morons on the internet who troll for email addresses to use in Spam and other scams. Perhaps someone you know has put your address on one of those forwards with 100 other email addresses. At some point that forwarded email ended up at a Spammers inbox and your address was added to the Spammers list. Or perhaps the Spammer was scanning the internet for websites looking for email addresses. He/she might have found your website or something about you on another site, or perhaps some mention of you and your email address on some website discussing happenings in your town. It is easy to do, since the Spammers use computer programs to gather random email addresses, and those programs can scan millions of webpages each day.

Once your address is acquired, the Spammer can send out whatever they want using it. They can email the president (president@whitehouse.gov) and say it comes from you. They can email you, and say it comes from the president. There is absolutely no security or authentication built in to the email system that everyone uses today. The goodnews is that most spam fighting software works pretty well, and Cloudmark works especially well in catching and deleting the Spam. So many people now use some kind of spam deleting software, and if they do, they probably never see the emails using your name. Even if they do see it, most people know how pervasive the Spam problem is, and they can readily recognize that the message isn't a real email from you.

If you want to minimize your exposure to spam fraud, here are some things that will help:

1) Try to get your friends and family to stop sending you "forwards". These are the cute emails with photos, poems, stories, links to funny videos, etc... that get passed around the internet with other people's email addresses embedded in them. Forwards not only spread your email address around, they also are a great way to get a computer virus.

2) Minimize your web presence. This isn't really a great option for people in business, since you want people to find you, and there is little you can do to guarantee the wrong people won't find you. But you should try to keep your email address restricted to legitimate business activities if you want to minimize its exposure for spam. You should use a personal email address for other matters such as signing up for newsletters and logging into other websites.

3) If you have your own website, and you don't mind a little extra hassle, there is a neat trick you can do to start cutting down on Spam in your inbox as well as minimizing spam abuse. Setup a second email address just for stupid website logins and other online business not directly related to your business. For instance, you can call it online@yourdomainhere.com. Some people create a different email address once or twice a year and just delete the old one whenever the email stops piling up. For instance, you could use the month and year when you create the email, for September 2006, you would ask your internet guy to make an address of junk0906@yourdomainname.com. You would only use this address for unimportant websites. Never for banks or other logins where you know you will want to return in a year or more. This technique does take several months to start really making a difference, since your existing email address is already "out there" and still collecting spam. It can take over a year for the spammers to consider your address too old to continue to regularly use.

4) Use Spam fighting software when checking your email. If you use Outlook or Outlook Express, we especially recommend Cloudmark for getting rid of Spam. It is very effective, but there is an annual fee. Webroot software also has a decent Spam fighting tool.

The good news is that the Spam wars may be ending soon. Many ISPs and website programmers (including me!) are testing and deploying Spam filters as part of their email accounts so that most Spam will soon be deleted before it ever reaches your inbox. This will probably save us millions of dollars in lost productivity and fraudulent activity.

That's about all you can do for now ,
Scott Lynn