Spam Prevention - Home User

Someone had asked me to post some tips for home users that doesn’t have the luxury of protection from a anti spam appliance. These users probably won’t have the need to know about greylisting, SPF, DKIM, etc as well. So before I go on to blog about the methods used in anti spam technology, I will do a simple write up on how home user can prevent themselves from being a spam victim and some ways to control it.

Firstly, I think many home users received spam because they do not have a good email discipline. Most people that received spam have registered their email on commercial websites, sign up for some out of the blue marketing promotion, registered as members as they download software, etc. The problem here is that many of these sites do not have a privacy policy that they follow. Emails are sold or leaked to the marketing world.
Spammers even make money by selling their email database to other spammer and the cycle goes on. Therefore you will received more and more spam emails. End user has to be careful about giving away their email. Honestly this is the most important basic of all. I will list down a few steps on what you can do and how you can cut down on your existing spam.

Prevention

1) Don’t reply to unsubscribe spam mail! Please do not click on any link on the spam mail to unsubscribe the spam. If you did not sign up for it, don’t click to unsubscribe it. The moment you click on the link, you are basically telling the person that sent you the spam that, “ Hey, yes. I am a active user. Go ahead and spam me in future!” But of course if it come from a reputable company, then there is probably no harm in clicking on that link.

2) Don’t forward an email from someone you don’t know to a list of people. They are perfect for spammers to harvest email addresses.

3) Try using a complicated email username when signing up for email address. Email such as jenny76@hotmail.com” are easily havest by Spammers' software.

4) Camouflage your email address. Putting your email address in plain text on your web site is easy for spammer spider to harvest email addresses. Best is to disguise your email address by stripping out periods and "@" symbols. For example, "YOURNAME AT YAHOO DOT COM." You can also make the "@" an image, this will prevent crawlers from identifying it.

5) Get a desktop anti virus with anti spam filter. There are many desktop virus software that comes with anti spam features. Example would be Kaspersky, Sophos, etc. Such anti virus software are normally affordable and effective.

Control

If you are using outlook express or outlook to download your mails, you can also set rules to filter your mails to the junk folders. I will take outlook express as an example and list down the step below. I will use the word “Viagra” as an example.

1) Open up Outlook Express
2) Go to Tool --> Message Rule --> mail
3) Click "New"
4) Select the condition for the rules to take effect and the action to it. I will choose words contain in the message body as it is normally more effective compare to the others and i will choose moved mail to junk email then delete as even if it turn out to be detect wrongly, i will still have the mails.



5) I will fill in the specify words that i have decided and select the folder.





6) Voila!!!!! The rule has been created. Any new message with the word viagra in the mail body will be moved to the junk folder.

Above is just a simple steps to filter out potential spam mails. But such rules are tedious and may need to be find tune along the ways. Try the desktop anti virus with anti spam features. It will probably be easier, less time consuming and more effective.