Junk Email
Not all the unsolicited email you receive are jokes.
A good portion of it may be very earnest commercials, otherwise known as "junk email" or more popularly "spam".
Most of us get it, and those who get it, hate it.
What qualifies as junk email, also known as SPAM?
Strictly speaking, spam is unsolicited mass email.
This generally applies to advertisements, however, it also includes emails sent from people you know, such as chain letters, or email hoaxes.
Mass unsolicited email messages are not only annoying for the people who get them, but also waste resources on the Internet, and affect the world-wide community as a whole.
This kind of behavior is not tolerated, and will get you kicked off the Internet.
Unfortunately this code of honor was much easier to enforce when there were only a few hundred or even a few thousand users on the Internet.
Back then, most everyone were scholars or developers and probably knew each other to a certain extent.
Peer pressure really meant something.
Now that the Internet community has topped a few million people, Internet service providers do what they can, but end users, such as your self, are finding themselves in need of supplemental methods of managing their email.
Why do I even get junk email when my name isn't in the "To" or "cc" field?
When email is exchanged between two servers, a dialogue of names for delivery is exchanged that is not recorded in the short header (the "To" or "CC" fields).
This is what enables a single email to be mailed to multiple addresses without everyone's email address listed in plain view, and is a valuable protocol.
Not all mailing lists are for junk email.
That is why it appears that the junk email you receive is not addressed directly to you.
The "From" field is also a courtesy record, and has nothing to do with delivery of email.
The true sender's address is hidden in what is referred to as the "full header".
This is where the IP addresses of the computers used to send the email message are recorded.
Every computer on the Internet has a numerical "IP" address that distinguishes it from other computers connected to the Internet.
These are very difficult to "forge", or fake, and most spammers generally don't bother going to such lengths to hide their tracks.
How did I get my email address on that spam list anyway?
The CDT recently released a 6-month study to determine what actions expose email addresses to spam lists.
They found that the three most common method email marketers used were to gather email addresses from web sites, Usenet postings, and "dictionary attacks" on ISP mail servers (where the spammer sent an email to a randomly generated list of email addresses, keeping record of all the email addresses that were deliverable).
Short or easy-to-guess email addresses (smith@isp.com) are especially vulnerable to being found out in dictionary attacks.
It has also been found that web page 'cookies' acquired from web browsing (most are automatically downloaded without your knowledge when you visit many popular commercial websites) are used to add your name to advertising lists.
The best advice to managing email is threefold:
- Actively hide access to your email address.
When filling out forms and surveys, avoid giving out your real email address (use a fake email address otherwise, such as nospam@myhouse.com) to people or sources you don't expect to correspond with.
Some people use multiple email addresses for different correspondences, such as having one email address for family and friends, and another for online shopping.
If you have a web site, do not use a mail-to link, but rather spell our your email address in such a way that a real person would be able to figure it out, but a scanning program would not (example: support at imt.net).
- Utilize email filtering techniques.
Internet Montana provides a premium filtering service that will filter and prevent both junk and virus-infected emails from ever reaching your inbox.
Another alternative is available through your email program, as you receive your email.
Most email programs have a filter option you can set to automatically dump emails that are not addressed specifically to you into your deleted items folder or trash folder (this would be most junk emails).
While you still receive the junk email, at least you don't have to weed through it to find your real email.
- Report the spammer.
If you are having problems with a particular sendee or a particularly offensive message, forward the message to abuse@imt.net with the full header (including IP addresses) and we can investigate the source, and probably ban their IP from our server.
The easiest way to do this is to forward the junk email as an attachment.
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