e-skills UK Guide

Eliminating spam

Managing spam email

Spam email messages are an unfortunate by-product of using email for business purposes. The term spam comes from a Monty Python sketch that pokes fun in a noisy and incoherent way at nothing in particular. Spam messages are sent in their thousands by individuals hoping to either sell you something, con you into revealing some personal data or sending someone money.

By managing spam email messages effectively you will save yourself a lot of time and possible damage to your IT systems and even financial loss. It is therefore worthwhile understanding spam in some detail.

Why spammers spam

The principle behind commercial spam is simple. Sending email is virtually free. So, even if only a few people place an order as a result of sending thousands of emails, the effort is still worthwhile.

The principle behind malicious spam is the same. If just one or two people:

Have their PCs infected.
Send money in response to a scam.
Log on to a corrupt website which cons you out of your money.
Pass on a hoax email.

Spammers think it is worth sending many thousand that don’t get through.

Why is spam a problem?

As we have discussed, some spam is designed to:

Infect your PC with malicious software.
Attempt to defraud you or entice you to buy fake products.

In addition some spam contains offensive material or links to offensive web sites, some of which looks fine initially until you click through the pages.

Even putting these problems aside, all spam:

Is an overhead on your email connection if you have to download it.
Obscures useful email with the result that you might miss an important message.
Is a major drain on the internet. The majority of all email messages travelling on the internet are spam.

The problem with spam is that it can be hard to distinguish between spam messages and genuine ones and as quickly as people come up with new ways to detect spam, the spammers come up with ways around them.

As a result anti-spam filters cannot be 100% effective. They will always let some spam through and falsely label some genuine messages as spam. However it looks like spam is likely to be reduced due to:

Increasingly efficient spam filters.
Vigilance on the part of email users.
Legislation against spammers and advertisers mentioned in spam (together with some high visibility convictions).
More sophisticated checks by email servers that the originators of emails are who they say they are.

However in spite of these initiatives, spam is still a major problem.

How to spot spam

Scam techniques are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Here are some rules of thumb for spotting scams:

It’s an old saying, but still relevant: “If it looks too good to be true, it probably is”. If you are being offered large amounts of money, something for free or a prize for a competition you never entered; move on.
Consider any request for money as a possible scam. Even if it appears to be from an authoritative source such as the Data Protection Registrar or an internet hosting company.
Don’t trust what you read. A common scam is to invoice you for a product or service you never ordered. You might even be threatened with being put on a debtor’s black list if you don’t pay.

How to manage spam

It is important that you learn how to manage spam. If you get spam:

Think before opening suspicious emails. It used to be the case that just opening an email couldn’t infect you, but that’s no longer true. Many spam messages are easy to recognise just from the title. Don’t be tempted to open them, just delete them.
Don’t reply to spam. The message might give you an email address or a web site to ‘unsubscribe’. Don’t use them unless you know who the originator is. Replying to a spammer validates that you have a properly used email address and will encourage the spammer to send you more spam.
Spam is extremely irritating. You might be tempted to send a rude email to the originator. However, the spammer is almost certainly pretending to be the victim who appears to be the originator. It is very likely that the victim will be getting hundreds of failed email messages already, so adding a rude email is adding insult to injury.
From time to time you might get what looks like an official message warning you about something such as a new virus or how to get free money and will ask you to pass it on. It’s almost certainly a hoax and you are perpetuating it if you pass it on. Worse, if you pass it on to a business contact you might look naïve at best. If in doubt don’t pass on messages like these.

Preventing spam by protecting your email address

Spammers routinely trawl web sites and web forums looking for people’s email addresses that they add to their databases.

If you need to publish your email address on a web site or by posting a message in a forum, consider making it difficult to read so that automated scanning tools do not get your email address.

Two common methods are to:

Show your email like this (or similar): “name [at] address.co.uk”. By putting the ‘at’ in brackets, a human can see that you meant “name@address.co.uk” but spammers’ computer programs probably won’t.
Add spurious characters to your email address that humans can recognise, but programs can’t. For example: NameRemoveThisBeforeSending@address.co.uk will be seen as a proper Email address, but humans will interpret it as name@address.co.uk.

Recent email programs have an option that suppresses pictures in emails. This is because spammers embed your email address in the address of the picture. Displaying the picture will tell the spammer that their message got through to you and will encourage them to send more. If you have this option switch it on and override only in messages that you are certain come from a well-meaning source.

Filtering out spam messages

Email filters scan incoming messages looking for spam and malicious software. They operate on one or more of these levels:

Email provider. If you use another company to manage your incoming email, the chances are they will do some filtering on your behalf. However, filtering at this level cannot take account of individual needs. You might therefore find it is rejecting too much genuine email. Make sure you can:
1. tailor it to meet individual needs; or
2. identify and mark suspect mail in a way that can be overridden by an email server or email reader (the most common way is to add an attachment with a standard name).
Email program. Most email software includes options to filter spam. Your PCs should, of course, have virus checking installed as standard.

You can run filtering at more than one of these levels. In particular, filters run by email providers and email servers tend to be better at identifying spam than filters included with email readers.

Taking proactive action against spam messages

Most small businesses accept that fact that they may get a few spam messages each day and simply delete them and carry on trying to run their companies!