What to do about spam?
UNDER CONSTRUCTION

What is spam?
Spam is flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it. Most spam is commercial advertising, often for dubious products, get-rich-quick schemes, or quasi-legal services. Spam costs the sender very little to send -- most of the costs are paid for by the recipient or the carriers rather than by the sender.

In addition, do not forward any emails, even though they may sound convincing, unless you VERIFY IT'S AUTHENTICITY first! (This includes most urban legends of viruses, making money somehow, and sending money to the first person on a list and forwarding it on... which *IS* illegal and violates Title 18, United States Code, Section 1302, the Postal Lottery Statute. And by the way... 95% of those "virus" warnings are untrue, Microsoft isn't going to give you any money if you forward emails, a virus cannot do physical damage to your computer, there's no bill in progress to try to tax email (no true one that I know of anyway), and those "send a dollar to each person and you'll get thousands back" ARE illegal pyramid schemes whether they say so or not.

If it sounds to good to be true, it probably is.

Norton Antivirus HOAX list

Nethoaxes: Urban legends and folklore

Pyramid Schemes, Ponzi Schemes, and Related Frauds

What can we do for everyone on our server?

There's little we can do about spam. Spam now accounts for 38% of all e-mail traffic, up from 8% in 2001. For the time being, it's the responsibility of each user to handle their own email, keeping email addresses private, and filtering out spam by themselves.

Here's a quick list of steps to consider:

  • Keep your email private. Don't use it to register or post anywhere on the internet. Get a separate "junk" mail account to use for these purposes (such as from hotmail.com or yahoo.com).
  • Delete the messages manually from your inbox
  • Or if advanced, setup email filters on your reader to automatically delete or move to another folder, any email that doesn't contain your address in the headers. Most spam hides who it gets sent to.
  • Don't respond to any "remove" instructions in spam... most just take that as verifying it's a valid address to send even more to.
  • Publicly posted email addresses, including those on all of our web pages, are routinely grabbed from the pages for these email lists. If at all possible, avoid putting your direct email address on the web. Instead, use a mail form or change it to something like mailto:REMOVEMEdkirk@physics.syr.edu (although requiring the sender to actually remove the part in capital letters).
  • I may consider, at some point in the future, an "opt-in" list to choose if you'd like to block any known spamming domains, although the problem here is valid email from the same domains may algo get blocked.

    One method I have considered is blocking all email from a spam blacklist. The major problem with this, is it may block valid emails from the same domains. For instance, many spammers use emails From: spammer@yahoo.com, so the blacklist would block any email from anyone @yahoo.com.

    The best thing you can do at this point is to guard your email addresses closely, and share them only with selected, trusted parties. Any email address published on a web page, or used to post or register anywhere on the internet, can and in many cases, be added to spam lists.

    Hiding contact information
    For some e-mail users, a reasonable, sufficient, and very simple approach to avoiding spam is simply to guard e-mail addresses closely. For these people, an e-mail address is something to be revealed only to selected, trusted parties. As extra precautions, an e-mail address can be chosen to avoid easily guessed names and dictionary words, and addresses can be disguised when posting to public areas. We have all seen e-mail addresses cutely encoded in forms like "" or "echo zregm@tabfvf.pk | tr A-Za-z N-ZA-Mn-za-m".
    In addition to hiding addresses, a secretive e-mailer often uses one or more of the free e-mail services for "throwaway" addresses. If you need to transact e-mail with a semi-trusted party, a temporary address can be used for a few days, then abandoned along with any spam it might thereafter accumulate. The real "confidantes only" address is kept protected.

    Some additional links on spam:

    Fight Spam on the Internet

    Spam: Where it Came From, and How to Escape It

    Needed Now: Laws to Can Spam


    Somewhat related links:

    Mail Fraud

    NY State "Do Not Call" anti-telemarketing registry

    Disclaimer:
    I don't guarantee these pages to be 100% accurate or complete, although I did try to make them that way.
    If you notice an error, or something that could help people better, please let me know.
    Physics Help Pages Maintained by Dan Kirkpatrick
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