ETI aggressively filters out much of the unsolicited e-mail addressed
to our customers. To do this, we employ several databases supplied
by organizations that list open relay servers. We also employ software
specifically designed to detect and remove unsolicited e-mail.
However, spammers — people who send e-mail in bulk to people
who haven't requested it — prize live addresses more than anything,
and if they can get you to tell them that your address is a valid
one, they will immediately add your address to their own databases
and circumvent all the spam filters by sending you spam that is
addressed directly to you.
Unfortunately, one of the most common ways they do this is by collecting
the addresses of people who ask to be taken off their lists. You
should never respond to spam, even to ask to be removed from the
spammer's list. Telling them to take you off their list just lets
them know that there is a real, live person reading their mail at
your address.
Another characteristic of spammers is that they often change addresses
— so that by the time a recipient takes action to stop them,
they've already moved on.
Fighting spam on your desktop
The situation is not completely hopeless, however. Most e-mail
programs will let you filter e-mail as you collect it, so that you
can send most of the offending messages directly to your trash folder.
If you're using Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express, these filters
are called "message rules" and the wizard for setting them up can
be found under the "Tools" pulldown menu. In Netscape, message filters
can be found under the "Edit" menu.
You can either create a mail folder for spam, which you can inspect
and discard periodically, or send the mail directly to your Deleted
Items folder. When creating message rules, however, be careful not
to overstate them — you want to make sure that you only remove
mail from spammers, not your legitimate messages.
Another technique for fighting spam is to close the preview pane,
so that you need to double-click on a message header to read that
message. Spammers often embed invisible links back to their servers
in the images they send in their e-mail — but if you never
view their images, they won't know that they've reached your inbox.
In Outlook, Outlook Express, and Netscape 6, you can find the checkbox
for turning off the preview pane under the "View" menu at the top
of the window. In Netscape 4, turn off the "Message" option
in the "Show" menu under the "View" menu at
the top of the page.
Creating Filters on your ETI account
