18 Feb 2008 04:53:16 | Sharon Fling
Are you sick of spam relentlessly spewing into your emailbox? So
was I, until I learned how to knock it out, or at least slow it
down, with my one-two punch. Do both of these things, neither of
which will cost you a penny, and enjoy a distinct decrease in
the amount of garbage in your inbox.
Here we go:
#1 Mail Washing
First, hit the spam with Mailwasher, available free at
www.mailwasher.net. This easy to set up little program lets you
preview email before downloading it. You see all the usual
details - sender, subject, size - but with one big difference:
you can decide BEFORE downloading if you want it.
You get, I'm sure, many emails that you wouldn't have downloaded
if only you'd known what was in them. That's just one thing
Mailwasher can do for you. Its real power is in its ability to
'bounce' unwanted messages (spam) right back to the person who
sent it, marked 'message undeliverable.'
To the spammer it looks as if your e-mail address is no longer
active, and hopefully, the next time they 'clean' their list,
your email address will fall off. But even if it doesn't,
Mailwasher adds the spammer's address to a blacklist. The next
time they spam you, it's already marked for deletion. (You can
always unmark it.)
When you're finished 'washing' your mail of spam and unwanted
downloads, click 'process mail' and whatever messages are left
will be downloaded as usual when you log on through your e- mail
program, which you can do directly from MailWasher.
I have over 20 email addresses, so you can imagine the flood of
spam that poured in my mailbox every day. Now I run them all
through Mailwasher first, and it has made a huge difference.
To further reduce spam, Mailwasher has another trick that your
regular email program doesn't. It learns. There are all kinds of
settings, filters, sorts and alerts. The more you use it, the
more it learns what you do and don't want to see. It does lots
of stuff that I haven't even tried yet. But for what I need -
quick and dirty spam elimination - it does great.
Best of all, it's free to try. If you like it, the author asks
that you pay him whatever you think is fair. How much you pay
him is up to you, but the funds go to future development of the
product. Considering how useful this program is, I think that's
a very worthy cause.
#2: Email Encoding
Once you've got Mailwasher going, you're on your way to getting
off the spam lists. To stay off, don't skip this second step!
One of the ways that spammers get your email address is through
harvesting programs that crawl the net snatching email addresses
off of websites, message boards, newsgroups. Anywhere they can
find something that looks like an email address, they grab it.
And the way that they know it's an email address is by looking
for 'mailto' or the '@' symbol.
There are programs available - also free - that will encode your
email address for you. This converts your ASCII email address
into its equivalent decimal entity. For example, the letter "a"
equates to: "a" (without the quotes), the letter "b" equates to:
"b", and so forth.
Here's an example of an email address:
"johndoe@
someserv
er.com"
which appears as: johndoe@someserver.com
To make the link clickable, you need to include the HREF tag,
i.e.
"
nospam@my
server.co m"
which appears as: nospam@myserver.com
Try it. Copy either of those expressions (WITHOUT the quotes),
save it in an HTML file, and open it in your browser. It looks
and acts just like any other email link, but the spam bots only
see numbers and characters.
Here are a few free email encoders:
(JavaScript utility)
(JavaScript
utility, doesn't include HREF tag)
(emails the results to you)
Encoded e-mail addresses can be read and translated back into
the original ASCII text by almost any web browser, so you can
use encoding wherever you can use HTML. I've replaced regular
email links with encoded links on all of my websites.
Unfortunately not all forums will let you use HTML. In those
cases, you'll have to rely on putting the NOSPAM in your email
address, or using only "throwaway" email addresses such as from
Yahoo or hotmail when posting to public places. Another trick:
spell out your email address, i.e. my email address is "sharon
at geolocal.com" or "sharon at geolocal dot com." Not as good as
being encoded and clickable but better than nothing.
Of course, spammers are a clever bunch. Whatever we come up
with, they'll find a way around. Pretty soon they'll probably
program their nasty spam bots to translate encoded emails for
them.
The only answer for that is to replace email links with an IMAGE
of your email address. Only human eyes can see that an image is
an email address, so it can't be harvested. But, *don't* link
the image to your email address unless it's encoded - that would
defeat the purpose, which is to make your email address
unreadable by the spam bots.
The downside is that human eyes will have to manually type your
address to send you an email. Unfortunately, that includes
people you WANT to hear from. There's no way around that.
Hopefully one day we won't need to go to such lengths to avoid
what has become the scourge of the internet.
So, to summarize:
1) use Mailwasher to delete and bounce spam, which hopefully
will get you dropped from spam lists, and
2) encode your email address on web pages and other places where
it can be harvested. Try the one-two punch and see if it works
for you. If nothing else, it will give you the satisfaction of
knowing spammers are getting useless messages in their mailboxes
too.
About Author :
Sharon Fling is the author of "How To Promote Your Local
Business On the Internet", and publishes an electronic
newsletter that gives business owners tips, tools and resources
for targeting local customers. For more information, visit
http://www.geolocal.com or send a blank email to:
subscribe@localbizpromo.com?subject=TRAART
