Avoiding Junk Email

Junk email mostly comes from people with a purely commercial motive; they try to sell you something, and use the Internet equivalent of direct mail. (Spam just for fun, or for political purposes, is so rare that you probably won't ever see it.)

Lately, some spammers (but still a minority) have become more civilized; they are afraid that the public outcry against spam will cause adoption of federal anti-spam laws. While they may not do the worst offenses, they still waste your time.

In any case, most spam is still the "hard-core" spam, where law, ethics and taste play no role. You really want to avoid it. Once you get it, you should never reply to it. Spammers may tell you that you can unsubscribe by sending them an email. However, instead they just increase the amount of mail sent to you. Once the spammer knows your email address is real, he is only too happy to send you more ads (one of spammers' biggest problems is to identify valid email addresses). Even worse, the spammer may sell your validated email address to other spammers.

To avoid spam, you can use the following methods:

• When picking a new email address for yourself
  • do not use a very simple name, like bob@..., or carol@...; spammers add to their databases such simple names even if they don't find you on the web -- just on the good chance that such an email exists
• When posting to Usenet
• use a separate mail account (where you don't care if you receive junk email)
• or use invalid email address
• or use a tweaked email address, e.g., lkmmoroz@ucla.edu instead of mmoroz@ucla.edu ; don't forget to warn the readers (perhaps, in the signature at the end of your posting) how you tweaked the address, so they can reply if they wish (don't worry about spammers, who use automatic software to gather email addresses and won't be able to heed your warning).
• When making a public Web page, the same recommendations apply, since the spammers have software that traverses the Web, and picks up anything resembling an email address. Unfortunately, unlike on Usenet, you normally want to put your email address on your own Web page. So, it is more difficult to fight spam here. If your Web page is not found by AltaVista, you can just ignore the problem (spammers are unlikely to find you!). But otherwise, you have to decide what your best tradeoff is.
• When submitting an email address as part of registration
• make sure there is a privacy disclosure which guarantees your data won't be supplied to third parties
• don't register at all (or use an invalid email address) if the Web site is suspicious.
• If you are really paranoid about spam, make sure your friends don't mention your email address on a public Web page: spammers will find it there. To find if such lists are publicly available, just search for your own email address on AltaVista. Whatever you find, a spammer can find.

The following features will help you to identify spam when it reaches your mailbox. Even if only some of these features are present, you should assume it is spam unless for some reason you know otherwise.

• Return email address doesn't seem to be real, e.g., c1a311@sprint.com.
• Illegal, marginally legal, or immoral products are advertised (e.g., adult-oriented Web sites; pirated software; gambling).
• An obscure product is advertised which you are extremely unlikely to be interested in. Spammers can afford it, since they often send an ad to hundreds of thousand of people (it costs only about 1/2 cent per address!). So if just 0.1 percent buy, they get hundreds of sales.
• The ad is repeated regularly (e.g. once a week), usually without a single change in the wording. Spammers hope that you either overlooked their previous email or that you will be persuaded to buy if you see the ad many times.
• Very little information is provided about the vendor (e.g., just a P.O. Box instead of a full mailing address).

The latest news on the legal battles surrounding spam is at http://www.cauce.org/latest.html (many other resources at this site are also interesting).

See also http://www.cyberpromo.org/spamlinks.htm. This site originally was intended as an antidote to the King of Spam, Sanford Wallace, and his company Cyberpromotions (the real URL for that company was www.cyberpromo.com, rather than .org). However, last year the company lost several battles in court, and was closed down for good in October. More than that, Mr. Wallace himself renounced his throne and joined the ranks of the anti-spammers. If you are interested in the spam vs anti-spam war, you shouldn't miss this fascinating story, available, e.g., at http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,22016,00.html.

Please send comments and questions to Max Moroz (mmoroz@ucla.edu)