Poor Hormel Foods. Their product, that has been a grocery store mainstay for so many years now, is now synonymous with one of the most reviled words known on the Internet: SPAM. Who these days, does not know what spam is? Those intrusive, unwanted solicitations, announcements, and dubious requests that seem to flood our email boxes more and more these days. Well, if you're frustrated and have had enough, there IS something you can do about it.
The Anatomy of a Spammer
Some folks consider spammers evil people -- bottom-crawling direct marketers on the same level as those dinnertime-interrupting telemarketers. Spammers go to all sorts of measures to hide their true identities for this reason. Most use some kind of cloaked e-mail address or anonymizer program, both so any kind of retaliation by their victims finds no home and so that the spammer cannot be back-tracked. Retaliation can take the form of simple angry emails called "flames" or "mailbombs," delivery of enough email to overload and crash and email server. The sad case of irony is that if you do try flaming a spammer, chances are that they'll just add your email to more spam lists since they now know that there's a live body on the other end. You're better off either simply deleting the email or taking some of the action we explain a little further down below.
Spammers use all kinds of dirty tricks to compile databases of e-mail addresses. The main tool used by spammers is e-mail extractor software. This software can be used to search for and extract e-mail addresses from web sites, message boards, discussion groups and chat rooms. Spammers can also purchase millions of e-mail addresses from bulk list sellers.
What You Can Do
There are ways to discourage e-mail spamming. For starters, when you post on a message board or discussion list or register for a chat room, start a separate e-mail address for doing so. Using one of the free, web-based email services like Hotmail or Mail.com is good for this, and it's one of the easiest ways to stop these annoying messages from reaching your real inbox. However, if you are an AOL user this will not help. AOL users are assigned e-mail addresses that correspond to their user names. So when you enter a chat room using AOL, your e-mailbox is usually coincidentally filled with spam soon after.
Your Internet service provider (ISP) can be of some help to send those spammers packing. Usually, ISP's have mailboxes set up to handle spam complaints (typically abuse@"yourISP"). So when you get an unsolicited e-mail, forward it on to this address. Be careful, however. If you have signed up for a legitimate, opt-in e-mail service or newsletter (like this one), do not send forward it on to abuse. Try keeping a good track of which promotional e-mails that you have signed up for so you'll know they're not spam.
There are many other tools and filters out there that can help you "can that spam" if you have become a frequent target:
Your own emailbox filters - start with where the email comes. Most email programs these days allow you to filter out email according to certain parameters you set. Filtered emails can be sent directly to your email trash folder. Good terms to filter for are things such as "ADV" (indicates an advertisement and is required by law in some states), "$$$" (usually a good indicator of a solicitation), and "SEX" (needs no explanation, I'm sure).
Junkfilter (http://junkfilter.zer0.org) - Junkfilter is software that filters out spam messages that are indexed in its database of spam e-mail addresses. The software is updated by users forwarding spam that has passed through the filter to the company who will add those messages to its database.
Mail Shield (http://www.mailshield.com) - Mail Shield is a customizable filtering system for e-mail servers that blasts the spam before it reaches people''s in boxes.
If you want to take even further action, consider some of these anti-spam resources:
Junk E-mail.org (http://www.junkemail.org) - Online resource on reporting spam, anti-spam legislation, law suits, and features ScamSPAM! ScamSPAM helps the FTC track down scam artists that use spam as a form of broadcasting their message.
Spam Cop (http://spamcop.net) - Spam Cop is a free service that helps you to file spam reports with the network administrators and for a small fee you can filter out spam messages.
C.A.U.C.E. (http://www.cauce.org) - The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail offers information on losses that companies take because of spamming.
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This article was provided by Web Ad.vantage, Inc. (www.webadvantage.net), a creative Internet marketing, promotions and public relations firm specializing in strategy building and implementation.
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