No More Spam?

If you have browsed this website just a little you will see that there are a lot of pages that have my email address on them. Now, hopefully, there are less pages that have a direct email link than there were. I have stolen an idea from someone who used it before me to reduce future spam.
You may see that I now show email addresses as:

wilf dot james at ntlworld dot com - to use my own as an example.

This format is intelligible to humans but far less identifiable to spammers' searching robots.
Another way is to create a small graphic   which shows your email address in its usual form but does not offer a direct link to an email address. This is also invisible to many spammers' robots.

The chances are that you would not be reading this if you have never received any spam. I have worked out a way of dealing with it that is relatively simple and effective with Netscape. You can do something similar with Outlook Express as far as I know. (I never use anything by Microsoft if I can avoid it.) I almost have to use Windows (preferably 98SE) but there is no point in using more rubbish than I have to.

Sort Your Emails With Filters
With Netscape it is possible to use message filters to sort your incoming emails. You can use both positive and negative filters. For a positive filter you will need to create a folder that matches something about the emails that you like to get. (E.g. Friends) For a negative filter you will need a folder called Spam.

If you use filters in the normal way, you would need to read an umwanted email normally to find something about it that will identify it uniquely. I have found a way to avoid this as you will see.

Some spam emails have subject lines that seem to be a series of strange letters in no obvious sequence. Most of these letters can be produced by holding down the left Alt key and typing in a number on the numeric keypad that is on the right hand side of most keyboards. In Windows the numbers start with 0 (zero) and the most common ones begin at 0192 and go higher.
If you see an email that has these characters in the subject line, you will know immediately that it is a spam email. Other obvious spam emails include the names of medications or offer financial services of one sort or another.
When you spot an obvious spam email, highlight the email above it in your Inbox list. Then press the down arrow key and IMMEDIATELY press Delete. The email will be transferred to the Trash folder. If you see several spam emails in successive lines in your Inbox, select the non-spam email above the spams, press the down key and IMMEDIATELY press the Shift key. This will enable two or more emails to be selected. If two or more emails are selected, none of them will be opened. With Netscape Messenger it is impossible to select a single email by highlighting it in the list without opening it. It always takes a fraction of a second for an email to open so it is possible to select one and IMMEDIATELY press Delete so that it doesn't open before it is transferred to the Trash folder. The same applies when you select two emails by using the down arrow key and the shift key. If you select the second email fast enough, the first one will not be opened.
When you have selected two or more emails this way, they can all be transferred to the Trash folder together by pressing the Delete key. Now, when you have transferred some presumed spam emails to the Trash folder you can go on to the next and most useful stage.

Looking at Spam Safely
In Windows you can use the program Wordpad to look at what is in your Trash folder safely. (You can also use Notepad for a small collection of spams but Wordpad is better.) Wordpad has the advantage that it remembers the last four files opened so that it is easy to look at the Trash folder again later without having to look for it again. No emails viewed with Wordpad can activate a virus or a trojan as you look at them. It is the best and safest way to look at suspicious emails.

When you look at the contents of the Trash folder (strictly speaking it is a file and NOT a folder) you will see a lot more about your emails than you knew existed. You will see a lot of information about the emails that can tell you who sent it and if the person used some form of re-direction to make it seem that the email came from a trusted source like a university. Study what you see very carefully to see how many spammers try to avoid "easy" filters. For example, the word Viagra could appear as Vi<i>agra. The <i> meta tag means switch the typeface to ITALIC but prevents a filter for Viagra from working because it no longer exists as an identifiable sequence of characters.

What to Search For
After you have studied the contents of the Trash file with Wordpad for a while you will see that a large number of spam emails include a web address that starts <a href=" or something similar. You know that very few of your usual email correspondents will include a web address in an email so <a href=" could be used as a filter for that sort of spam. Nevertheless, you do not want to class every email that includes <a href=" as spam so you will have to look for something more like <a href="http://web.artprice.com to be sure that you have something that can be used as a unique spam filter.

Other things to look for that hardly ever appear in ordinary emails are images. These will always be GIF or JPEG files. The start of a typical image would be something like this:
PGZvbnQgc2l6ZT0iMSI+DQphcmdpbmluZTMm
Such files will often include strings of letters that will never normally occur in ordinary text in any language. Some are obvious like AAAAAAA in the middle of an image file. Others are less obvious but pairs like DQ and PG often occur. The letter combinations that you will see in the spam that you get may be different but you will soon begin to recongnise the common ones. Other tricks include breaking up words in an email with pseudo meta tags. As these meta tags have no function, they are ignored when the email is opened normally and broken up words become whole. These pseudo meta tags usually start with <!-- This combination of characters is enough for a filter. Another disguise used is to convert ordinary letters into their hexadecimal equivalents and to use e.g. <=41> for the letter A or <=65> for the letter e. If you usually use English, you will not use characters like Å (C5) or ß (DF). These are sometimes used in place of the normal letters that they resemble. If you use Wordpad to look at the Trash file, you will see that many spammers tricks are repeated if you get a lot of spam. The way to check for repeats is to mark a suspect sequence of characters, pres Ctrl and C together and then press Ctrl and H together. This starts the Wordpad Search and replace function. When this is done for the first time in a session, the copied characters will be what is searched for. If the sequence is found a lot, it is a very good candidate for a filter.

Filtering Spam
Now you have found something that identifies a spam email you can start to organise filters. In Netscape Messenger select Edit in Netscape 4.7 or Tools in Netcape 7.0 and then Message Filters.
When you see the Message filter Dialog box, click on New. You will then be able to give a name to the filter and decide what the filter should do. For unwelcome emails the filter should move the emails to Spam or Trash. For welcome emails the filter should move the emails to Friends or whatever name you have given for your wanted emails from a known group.
(You will have to create any new folders/files that you will need for filtering.) You can use several groups of characters to search for in an AND or OR combination in the Subject line, the Sender or the Body of the email as you choose.
I always include in the title of the filter an indication of the action that it should take. Some examples are:
Medication - Trash, Loan - Spam, Mary Jones - Friends, Viagra - Delete etc.

I suggest that when you start using filters that you arrange that unwanted emails are directed to the Spam folder/file. Then you can have a look at the contents of the Spam file with Wordpad to double check that the filter is working exactly as you want it to. Then, when you are sure that no wanted emails are sent to the Spam file, you can select them all by pressing Shift and Down Arrow followed by Delete. They will then be transferred to the Trash file. There is an item called Empty Trash in the File menu in all versions of Netscape. This will clear everything in the Trash file so that it can never be recovered so you must be sure that you are definitely only deleting spam. When you are really happy that your filters to Spam are working in the way that you want, edit the filters and change Spam to Trash. If you find that some forms of offensive emails occur frequently in the trash folder, you can go to the next stage and change the filter from "Send to Trash" to Delete. Do not use the Delete option until you are very sure that your filters do not put wanted emails into the Trash file.

Priorities
The filtering system in Netscape Messenger allows you to select the priority of the filters. It is best to arrange that wanted emails are selected at the top of the list so that you still get them directed to the (say) Friends folder even if they may contain character sequences that match some spam you have found.

Progressively Get Rid Of More Spam
When you have started to use filters you will see that some spam still finds its way into your Inbox. The rule to follow is to make sure that your Trash has been emptied first. Then delete the suspected spam email in the way that I have said earlier. Next use Wordpad to have a look at the suspected spam email in the Trash file. You will soon see if it is spam or not, and if it is, what new filter you could use to get rid of it. Please remember to scroll down the filter list to a point below where your wanted emails are filtered to insert the new spam filter. You can change the priority of a filter with up and down arrows in the Message Filters dialog box if you want to change it.

No Spam in You Inbox?
If you follow this advice for a time you will find that progressively less spam finds its way into your Inbox and more and more goes into Trash. Then, one day you will select "Get messages" and find that there is no spam in your Inbox. :-)
It could pay to have a look in Trash with Wordpad to see what rubbish you have collected. You might have a friend who has sent you an email that got trapped in the Trash. Then, when you are sure that there are no wanted emails in the Trash, you can empty it so that it is ready for the next lot of spam.

Improve On This
This is the second draft of advice on how to deal with spam without using anti-spam software. If, after you have read this, you can offer advice on how to do the same with Outlook Express or another Mail program, please let me know so that I can make this advice more universal.

Please contact me at:

wilf dot james at ntlworld dot com

I think that the only way to defeat spam is to make it unprofitable. Most spammers work on the basis that if one in 10,000 spams gets a favourable reply, a profit can be made. I would like the ISPs to charge for bulk emailing on a progressively more expensive basis.

The average person sends only a few emails on any one day so the following suggestions will have no effect on a private person's ability to communicate with emails.

As a suggestion: if the first (say) 100 emails sent on any day were free, the next 100 would be charged at 0.1 cent or penny each, the next 100 at 1 cent each, the next 100 at 10 cents each and so on. Companies and organisations that have legitimate opt-in mailing lists should pay (say) GBP100.00 to register a list annually and be able to send up to 10,000 emails a day at no extra charge. Any company or organisation that continues to send emails to someone who has opted out should lose the right to opt-in mailing list privileges.

Any ISP that does not charge private individuals according the the agreed scale may be charged by receiving ISPs at 10 times the scale rate. If the sending ISP does not pay, all emails from that ISP will be blocked permanently by the receiving ISPs.

Any individual found to be selling email addresses should be fined GBP 100.00 for the first offence and progressively 10 times more for subsequent offences. After a third offence, he or she should be banned from using the internet for a year. If a person uses the internet while banned, the sentence will automatically become a jail sentence for a year. A company or organisation that sends spam without being an opt-in registered organisation will be fined one third of its asset valuation. Its owners and directors should also be fined one third of their annual incomes.

Any emailer who uses or attempts to use a disguised address should have all his or her emails blocked permanently.

I get nearly 100 spam emails a day now. The present EU legislation is useless. Something needs to be done to safeguard what is a precious resource.

If you can improve on these suggestions, please let me know.

Thank you for visiting Wilf's Advice Pages.
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