Spam Battles Continue

by Bob Seidel

The war with email spammers is far from over. Recent legislation (the Can-Spam act) is a dud, as any of us insiders knew is would be. To evade our laws, all the spammers have to do is to move overseas and that is what apparently most or almost all of them did. They saw this coming and had made their moves even before the act was finalized. Our only option is to close our Internet borders, and this is a step we would not want to take lightly.

Spam now accounts for the vast majority of email handled, and is becoming a burden to the companies whose hardware and software comprise our Internet. I am receiving at least 50 spam emails a day on one of my accounts and it is getting worse.

The best way to not get spam is to not give our your email ID except to known or trusted people. But many websites these days ask you for an email ID and you can't proceed without one. To handle this situation, just create an alternate email ID - most ISPs (Internet Service Providers) will allow you more than one email account. Create a junk ID, with the purpose of ignoring email sent to it. Even if the spammers start to use that ID, you can always just cancel it and create another. The downside of this approach is that you may in fact want email from that website. If so, you have to decide what to do - give them a good ID or not.

But the real focus of this column is on spam filtering. Back last summer, I had a month long activity with my ISP concerning their spam pre-filtering. Many ISPs use commercial spam filtering software, such as Spam Assassin. These programs filter spam before they even get to you - you never see it. But they do fail on occasion, and you will miss getting an email that was not spam or that was important to you. Because of this, and other problems, I had my ISP turn off Spam Assassin for my accounts.

Well, the flood started and it got worse by the day! But I do have my own spam filtering - a combination of personally written email filters and the Norton Anti-Spam program (NAS), which works quite well. My filters and NAS work quite well to corral the spam into a separate inbox folder, where I can check it at my leisure. This works fine for me, but the problem is when I am on the road and can't check my email remotely, when I get back there are hundreds of spams to wade through.

So, last week I asked my ISP to turn Spam Assassin back on, but on its least aggressive setting. Well, the same problems occurred - my wife and I began missing emails. I tried a test, just sending four personal emails to myself from other accounts; three of them were erroneously flagged as spam. I called and had them turn the filtering off again.

Another way to fight the spam mess is to just use a web-based email program. Terry Calhoun recommended a program called MailWasher, which allows you to screen your email before you actually read it to your PC. Also, most ISPs today now provide email access via the web.

But you still have to wade through the spam…

On another note, the "oh gosh" award for this week goes to a client who called me about their server going "beep" every couple of seconds. Turns out that somebody had placed a portable fan where it was pressing a key on the keyboard! Luckily they figured this out for themselves before I got there.

(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport / Oak Island area. You can visit his website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail him at bsc@bobseidel.com).