"Like almost everyone who uses e-mail, I receive a ton of spam every day. Much of it offers to help me get out of debt or get rich quick. It would be funny if it weren't so irritating."
- Bill Gates, "Why I Hate Spam", Wall Street Journal 2003
Years later, spam still continues to be a meaningless giant that torments the Internet. I had blogged about spam once in an early post in 2004. What has changed since then has been technology that is striving to provide better email filters. Fighting the source of the spam is something that several organizations are trying to work on and has not quite been successful.
As a computer program, what do you do when you think a particular email is spam? Obviously, the program cannot take the decision to delete it. It can move it to a folder and hope for the user to check it and then delete it. This is important because you would otherwise lose valid emails that are identified wrongly as spam.
The solution seems to be in identifying spam spot-on without making a mistake. The industry has some ground to cover in that direction. No spam filter today is 100% accurate. So the solution is not workable. What else can be done? Several things:
a. Users should realize that spam affects everybody and is a global problem. I have heard many people come up to me and say "Hotmail has more spam" or "I stopped using Yahoo because of spam", etc. Realize this - no email service provider is free of spam. If you don't get as much spam at your yahoo id as you do at your hotmail id, it is only because you either registered at too many places on the Internet with your hotmail id, or because you had your hotmail id for a longer time. Eventually spam will hit your other id as well.
b. Create longer email ids - most spam generators try combinations of letters and so an English word or a common name is more likely to be spammed rather than an uncommon email alias. So, for instance, a pandurang@... would attract more spam than a pandurang.nayak@... (unlikely that a right combination of names will be auto-generated).
c. Never give our your email id OR ALIAS at any website that you don't trust. I do this as a rule for the past two years now and has worked in reducing a lot of spam. Most websites out there sell out your email ids. Worse, the auto-spam software takes an alias and then sends an email by appending @hotmail.com, @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, etc. to the same alias. And guess what? In most cases that'll probably work as well. Most current email clients, both online and offline, do not automatically display images - which used to be a way the spamming site tracked that you recieved the email and hence realized that they'd hit a valid email id.
d. My Hotmail and Yahoo ids which recieved a lot of spam, actually have seen a decline. Also worked with the fact that I let Hotmail "expire", without checking it for a long while and then when I recreated my ID after a month or two, I saw a substantial decline in spam. I know this is probably not possible in all cases, but if you "gave up" an account due to spam, you can probably re-login and re-activate it and be surprised about how much lesser spam you'll get. Most spam software assumes the email is a valid one, unless they get a "bounce" on the email. And many software will continue to spam you even if there is a "bounce".
e. Never encourage spam - there are too many times that people themselves spam others. I am not talking about email forwards with jokes and other stuff. I am talking about chain mails that say things like "Don't add xxxxx as a friend in Yahoo! messenger. It is a dangerous virus that will delete everything on your hard disk." Give me a break. Such virus is not feasible unless a complete idiot is using the computer. But then, there will be a zillion fowards of this email and lo! you have more spam added to the world.
f. Report spam. This is one of the best ways to fight spam. When you see an email that was spam, tell your email service provider that this was spam. Click that button saying "This is spam" and report it. Over time, this is what will help eradicate most spam originators. But when you do so, be honest. Don't mark a newsletter that you signed up for, but never read, as spam. That is not spam. If you really don't want that newsletter, unsubscribe.
g. Be wise. I see so many people giving out email IDs on websites, blogs, forums, social networking sites, etc. freely. It is fine to do so when you know that the email id will not be revealed. But if the email id is just going to be posted on to the website, you are inviting spam. Several spammers automatically crawl websites looking for email ids.
So till we have a permanent, efficient, universal solution to spam - it is us who have to fight it. Spam is just like fighting a dangerous disease. If we don't do our bit, it can be too late when we realize our folly.