JP/18/DEFEND

JP/18/DEFEND

Defend your mail from spam

Arnawa Widagda, Contributor, Jakarta

Today, junk mail comes in two varieties -- the hard-copy advertising rubbish and the more insidious on-line variety otherwise known as spam.

And getting rid of spam is not as simple as posting a "no junk mail" message on your letter box. Spammers are cunning creatures and if they get your email address you will soon find yourself buried under a deluge of unwanted emails. Outsmarting the spammers, will then quickly become your No. 1 priority -- a bit like taking out the garbage, it's a dirty job but someone's got to do it.

The first line of defense for spam is your e-mail client. Usually, clients come with a tool to separate e-mails containing a specific word in the body or subject or a certain address.

Unfortunately, bulk mailers usually randomize their addresses, so you're better of trying to separate their e-mails by subject. You can also use this to separate e-mails from mailing lists, moving them into a special folder, so they wouldn't clutter your inbox.

There's also a way `whitelist' spammers. Instead of using a blacklist to filer out junk, you can create a filter that blocks everything it doesn't recognize.

This is a strong filter and shouldn't be used lightly because it can block a perfectly innocent mail from someone not on your contact list. It's a good idea, therefore, to move all white-listed mail to a special folder where it sits in quarantine before it is restored or deleted.

Both of these methods, however, still require you to download all mail, spending time and using up valuable bandwidth.

Fortunately, there's a way around this problem. Most mail programs have an option that allows you to only download the mail headers, the subject lines of the mail, and not the whole message.

These headers contain information such as the sender's address, the mail subject and its size. These information is enough for our filters to work, so you can download only the mail you want. You can also use them with POP and IMAP mailboxes.

The second line of defense is to be careful about giving out your email address. Most people are careless, putting their addresses on the web, forums and mailing lists.

Bulk mailers are known to harvest addresses from the web, using special software to catalog mail addresses online. When you're subscribing to forums and mailing lists, check their privacy policies. This should also apply to websites that require you to register.

A good privacy policy will assure you that you have the option to not receive mail that you don't want and tell you that your address will not be shown or sold to anyone else.

If you have to put up your address for some reason, you could always use a prefix like 'no-spam' or change the `@' with a 'at.' A person will then just remove the prefix, while software will just ignore the address because its not valid.

Another trick you could use is having a 'buffer' mail address. Instead of receiving mail directly, you put up this buffer account and not your primary mail address.

This is extremely useful if you have to put up your contact info on the web. You can set them up to filter unwanted mail and then forward them to your primary mail address, keeping it clean from most bulk mailers.

If you're using service such as Yahoo! or Hotmail, they usually offer some protection against bulk mailers. However, since these services don't offer customizable filters, some will eventually get through but thankfully not much. Deleting them is quite easy, just delete them from your mail list.