The BEST method of Spam protection is:
But it isn't free - Reasonable though.:
Posted on 11/16/2003 4:14:38 AM PST by sarcasm
In the undemocratic hierarchy of the white-collar workplace, spam is the great equalizer.
It lands in the e-mail inboxes of workers who troll and shop the Internet on the job. It finds the managers whose e-mail addresses are splattered on company Web sites. And it nails the presidents and CEOs normally more secluded.
"I get an average of 100 e-mails a day and, out of those, I would estimate 75 percent or 80 percent are nothing but spam," said Rob Bransom, chairman and chief executive of Mycom Group in downtown Cincinnati.
That's the going rate everywhere these days. In spite of software and services that detect, divert or block spam, junk e-mail has spread exponentially in the past four years. Postini, a Mountain View, Calif., company that sells e-mail security services, said spam content has soared from 5 percent of all e-mail in 1999 to about 75 percent today. In one 24-hour stretch, Postini's online spam tracker blocked 74,177,271 pieces of spam for its clients.
Spam has gotten so out of hand that states, including Ohio and Kentucky, can't sharpen the teeth in their anti-spam laws fast enough. The U.S. Senate unanimously passed its Can Spam Act last month, setting the stage for a House showdown with the direct marketing industry. California, meanwhile, passed the harshest spam law in the nation, authorizing fines of up to $1 million for each piece of unsolicited commercial mail. As a busy CEO, Bransom abhors spam. The irony is that his company makes spam-blocking software and sells it to 170 customers. His product, called MycomPro MailMax, routes users' e-mail to Mycom servers in Cincinnati, where it's quarantined unless users choose to read it. Bransom spends about 20 minutes a day, usually first thing in the morning, making sure that the blacklisted mail is genuine spam.
Today's spam scourge has made Bransom's routine a familiar one to anyone who uses a computer. Offers for mortgage refinancings, cheap prescriptions and sexual aids drown out legitimate e-mail and have turned what had been an enjoyable routine into a headache.
"I love e-mail," said Denise Bartick, CEO of Max Technical Training in Norwood. "I love communicating by e-mail and using it, but I'm concerned about what's going on because its effectiveness is being lessened by the spammers."
Bartick, whose company has 15 full-time employees, said she spends about 10 minutes a day deleting spam. She said about 70 percent of her 200 daily e-mails are unsolicited offers.
"If I don't recognize their name - and that's sometimes a problem - I delete it," she said. "Inevitably I delete something I received from a client, and they tell me, 'Denise, you didn't respond.' "
Eric Kornau, chief technical officer for Keyedge, a technology consulting organization in Pleasant Ridge, said one client had such a problem with spam that it changed its Internet domain name. He said the spammers expropriated its domain name and used it to send mass junk e-mail as if it had come from that company. The act, now a global phenomenon, is known as phishing. In its most harmful form, such spam is disguised as Microsoft software updates or eBay transmittals asking for credit card or other personal information.
"For maybe the past year, if I don't know where it came from, I delete it," Kornau said of his e-mail handling policy.
'It drives me crazy'
Like the most elusive game fish, spammers can be difficult to catch. Mycom, for one, has three developers working exclusively on MailMax product updates.
"There are people like myself that get an average of 100 spams a day, and if you have 1,000 people and each one of them wastes 10 or 15 minutes a day on it, it becomes a productivity issue as well as a bandwidth issue," Bransom said.
He added that spam has also become a concern for personnel officers because of the occasional pornographic content.
James Stegemeyer, a systems administrator for Convergys Corp., said he does his best to minimize the grief from spam.
"It drives me crazy," he said. "It makes me feel like doing something harsh with some of these people, but it's an uphill battle. They move around and go away. I've just gotten to the point of using products like invasion filters to get relief."
One remedy Stegemeyer doesn't want to see is some sort of heavy-handed, government-imposed registration requirement or the like for Internet usage.
"I'm for free speech," he said. "I don't want to throw out the Internet to get rid of the spammers."
But I like MailWasher (free).
Word of advice if you decide to try this approach: give your public account a very distasteful name. It causes most receivers to conclude that you are a spammer. Suggestions are: Spam@___.com; junkmail@___.com; Spammer@____.com; GotSpam@____.com; SpamEmail@___.com
The downside is that you may not get an answer to your inquiry (as receiver deletes your e-mail without reading it), but that's a price well worth paying to keep your private email account clean.
I don't read the email, much less buy from the jackasses.
My host allows me 255 e-mail addresses.
So I create on for each online vendor, then forward any incoming mail to my primary "mailbox".
For example, ebay@mydomain.tld, yahoo@mydomain.tld, etc.
In this way, if the address is harvested or sold, I HAVE them.
I run a home-based business, and have my own domain name.
My main e-mail account there is something like jones@jonesbusiness.com. But I never use that address. All of my e-mail goes out as maceman@jonesbusiness.com.
Funny thing is, I get tons of spam addressed to the jones@jonesbusiness main accoung address, even though no one but myself and my hosting service even knows about that address.
I can't figure out how the spammers ever found that one -- but they have, and my inbox is full of spam sent to that address.
I hate spam, and anything that puts those idiots out of business is fine with me.
What we have with spam is an example of the "tragedy of the commons." E-mail is a virtually free resource and since it is almost cost-free and no one owns this resource, some people find it easy to exploit in a wasteful manner.
Imagine what would happen if there were no concept of private property and it cost nothing to put up billboards and the technology was such that one advertiser could place thousands of billboard almost instantaneously. Now imagine that criminals had a scam where placing each billboard only cost them one one hundred-thousandth of a cent, but they stood to "earn" one cent from each billboard. There would be signs everywhere!
There needs to be some sort of enforceable standard for property rights that could be applied to electronic communication. I do not know how such a system could be made to work. The closest thing I can think of has to do with telemarketer phone calls.
In the "do not call" controversy over telemarketing calls, quite typically, the liberal courts saw it as a "freedom of speech" issue for telemarketers to be able to call you whether you want their calls or not. If you want to control what you get over your own phone, that is somehow "censorship." Now, if there were the understanding that your phone number was your property (even though you are actually renting it from the phone company), the argument could be made against telemarketers on the grounds of your right to privacy and your right to be free of tresspassers (in the same way someone renting an apartment is free to bar tresspassers or other unwelcome guests). Of course, such a concept of property rights would not be accepted by leftist courts that, in the name of "privacy" and "freedom," are all to eager to allow vocal or wealthy interest groups to impose costs on the rest of society. Having a system of property rights would clear up a lot of confusion, but there are interest groups that profit by this confusion.
I think the main solution to spam will be requirements that unsolicited email start with "XXXX" or whatever so that the reader can choose to delete it without reading or downloading. I blast throught my 200-400 emails in about 20-30 minutes - and I know I have inadvertantly deleted emails from legimate leads/contacts by accident fighting the spam fight.
Good in theory, not practical in practice.
Spammers steal other mail servers and hide their tracks, who pays the tax?
Some of the largest spammers operate in asia, who enforces the tax?
A single email can cross through 10 or 20 routers, how do you count and quantify the amount of tax due?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.