But what can you do if you receive spam? This guide looks at a few possibilities. It will not cover ways to prevent spam in the first place, for that you need to look elsewhere. A few pointers are temporary email addresses and a secondary email address for untrustworthy sites and communications.

Solution 1: Getting rid of the email address

If you do not really need the email address, or have only a few contacts, then you may want to consider ditching the email address that is receiving the spam and creating a new one.

That can be highly problematic because..

• You need to inform contacts of the change.
• You need to change the email on websites and services which can lead to spam to the new email address

Deleting an email address is usually not an option, especially since you cannot guarantee that the new email address will not receive spam as well.

Solution 2: Secondary Email address

A good solution is to create a secondary email address without deleting the first. Communicate the secondary email address to friends and contacts so that they use this new email address to communicate with you Make sure you only use the email for select contacts and not websites.

There are still chances that your email will land in the email pool of spammers. One example are friends who upload their email address book to social networking sites to find friends easier. Another possibility is a compromised computer of a friend or a hacked server on the Internet.

A secondary email address may help but you could also end up with two email addresses that receive double the amount of spam.

Antispam software

So called antispam software can block spam before it lands in the inbox. This reduces the amount of spam the user has to deal with. False positives can be a problem though, nothing’s worse than having to realize that important business emails have landed in the spam folder for the past couple days.

If you make use of antispam software you need to regularly check the spam folders to make sure that no false positives have been placed there.

Select antispam applications offer advanced features. Spamfighter for instance uses language recognition to automatically block emails that are written in select languages (or in all languages except those that are whitelisted by the user).

Spam Filtering and whitelisting

The goal should be to spend as little time as possible dealing with spam. A solid option to deal with spam is to whitelist senders. Blacklisting has the disadvantage that it is a regular task. Every new wave of email spam needs to be blacklisted.

Whitelisting on the other hand is a task that is done once, and then only when new contacts need to be added to the list. This means less work is involved in maintaining the list.

What you should not do

Some spammers add unsubscribe links to their email messages. Never ever use those links. If you do the spammer knows that the email address is valid. While legit companies will remove you from their list if you opt out, spammers will do the opposite since they have now verified that the email address is actually in use.

It goes without saying that you should not reply to spam emails as well as it has the same result.

Verdict

Spam is everywhere and users have to cope with it. Most email addresses will be used by spammers eventually and there is little one can do about it. You can limit the exposure but the chance is high that even careful users will end up with spam in their inbox.

Let us know how you cope with spam in the comments.

Spamfighter promises a solution for both of these problems. The software, which is available as a free and professional version, fights spam on a system wide level. The software supports Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail and Mozilla Thunderbird. Computer users with one or multiple of those clients configured on their system can make use of the antispam software.

Spamfighter Review

New users need to create a spamfighter account right in the application after installation. All they need to supply is an email address and password.

The application always starts in the Overview window which displays information and statistics. Among them the number of processed emails, the emails that have been blocked by Spamfighter or by the user, the time saved and the spam ratio. Community statistics are displayed as well, they currently read 45 billion processed emails of which more than 37 billion were spam, that’s a ratio of 85%.

Spamfighter taps right into all compatible email clients that are configured on the system. We could not get the program to work with the latest Mozilla Thunderbird 3.3 alpha, but that’s understandable since it is not officially supported. Spamfighter did install correctly into Outlook 2010 which was installed as part of Microsoft Office 2010. It has to be noted that Spamfighter can not process IMAP accounts.

The controls in the email client can be used to block or unblock emails among other things. Spamfighter will automatically create a new spamfighter folder in the email client where all emails that have been identified as spam are stored in. It is possible to unlock emails from there with the unblock button, or move regular emails into the spam folder with the block button. Emails in the spam folder can be accessed normally. All spam that is manually blocked is reported to the Spamfighter community so that all community members benefit from spam reports by members.

Additional controls are accessible under the more button.

Here it is possible to blacklist or whitelist domains or email addresses. Whitelisting means that emails will never be identified as spam, blacklisting the opposite of that.

The spam folder can be changed in the main program. Here it is furthermore possible to select if spam mails should be flagged as read or unread when moved, and whether Spamfighter should rescan the folder on startup which will rescan all unread emails that are stored in selected folders of the email client.

Filters can be edited in the main program as well. Here it is possible to add entries to blacklists and whitelists, or import lists from comma separated data files or compatible email clients.

Another interesting option is language recognition. Here it is possible to reject emails based on their language. Say you are from the United States and only receive emails in English. You could then select to only receive email messages in English which would automatically flag emails in different languages as spam. The other option available is to block emails from select languages only. It pretty much works the same way, the difference is that you will receive emails in all languages but the ones that you have selected to reject.

Spamfigther Verdict

Spamfighter is an excellent program for computer users who run at least one of the supported desktop email clients. Its core features are the cloud based approach to identifying new spam messages and the filtering system, especially the language filter.

The program is easy to setup and use as it integrates automatically with supported email clients. Experienced computer users will find the whitelisting and blacklisting of email addresses and domains useful, inexperienced users that it works very well right of the box.

Spamfighter Giveaway

We have ten licenses to give away. Please let us know about your current antispam setup for a chance to win a license.

In a form of an online service, reCAPTCHA offers exactly that. After signing up for the service, you’ll be able to place a captcha module on your website and avoid automated abuse while helping to read and store books of the past. With this special type of captcha engine, users are besides writing an already known word correctly into the widget’s field also required to recognize an additional word gathered by digitizing books which the OCR system wasn’t able to recognize due to various defects in characters.

Besides an obvious advantage of this service that makes real use of captcha, there are other great advantages to it. It’s easy to install thanks to plugin support for major CMS like WordPress, it’s accessible for eyesight-disabled people and it is based on high security standards that make it nearly impossible to penetrate. Moreover, the whole system can be quickly updated whenever a vulnerability is found without the webmaster having to worry about it. It’s also capable of IP filtering.

Should you wish for a great, free, customizable service with its own API that transforms waste of time into a useful and valuable activity while protecting your website against the dirt of spam? Here you go.

This includes well known services like Wikipedia and lesser known ones like the video sharing service Vimeo. Still it´s a great list and it´s worth taking a look.

I searched desperately for a good anti spam software and tried many. Most did not work to well in reducing spam, some worked to well and even stopped my normal mail from arriving. Then, finally after a long evaluation time I found the spam software that I´am still using today. It reduced my daily spam dosis of 500 to 4 in just two days.

Spamihilator “sits” between your mail client and the pop3 server analysing every mail that arrives. If the program thinks a mail is actually spam it moves it to the trashcan and the training area. I suggest everyone takes a daily look into the trashcan just in case something gets missing the first days. You can also put emails on a whitelist which means emails from the sender of the whitelist will never be seen as spam and thus always arrive.

If there is a whitelist there’s also a blacklist, you can enter emails that are always seen as spam and therefor automatically moved to the trashcan.

The training area helps to increase distinguishing chance of the spam software, you can select every mail and declare it as spam or not. Mailihilator then learns from these.

The amount of spam mails I received remained steady the same, but the amount that arrived at my mailbox was reduced by an astonishing 98% after just two days of using the spam program.

Spamihilator already has some good spam checking algorithm which gets better by using the training area but there are also lots of plugins which mostly serve a special spam type. Lets take a look at the most importanr plugins.

Addressee Filter: Quickly filters out mails that are not addressed To or Cc’d to one of your correct email addresses.

AlphabetSoup Filter 1.0: This plugin filters emails containing useless chains of characters.

Empty Mail Filter v1.0.2 : This filter blocks e-mails that are empty or contain very few words.

No Comment! Filter v1.0.0: This filter blocks e-mails that contain HTML comments. Spammers sometimes use HTML comments.

RFC-Validator 1.2.0: Filters mails that are not RFC conform or malicious

Scripts Filter v1.0.2: This filter blocks e-mails that contain embedded HTML scripts.

S_P_A_C_E Filter: Eliminates e-mails containing spaced-out words like `v 1.a g-r a` or `v.i c.0~d.i_n`.

There are lots more, all can be downloaded from the Mailinator homepage.

The traditional sending occurs either from local broadband connections or even from own server farms. Sending out 10 million spam mails that take up about 100 Gigabyteb of data takes up to five hours on a T3 connection.

The viral spammers use trojans and virii to infect other peoples computers and then send the mail from these instead of from their own connection. You might have heard that the dutch police recently captures three spammers who infected up to 1,5 million computers.

Update: So called bot networks are still a huge problem on today’s Internet. Using zombie PCs is a cost-effective way of sending spam messages to billions of users. Users new to the concept of Botnets should read the Wikipedia article on the topic for information on how botnets operate.

The Redtape Chronicles has published a 3-part series about botnets that makes another good read. It consists of the three parts “Is your computer a criminal”, “Virus gang warfare spills onto the net” and “Who’s behind criminal bot networks”.

It is a long read but well worth the time if you are interested in the topic.

Botnets back in 2007 were often between 50k and 70k PCs strong. The operators leased out the computing power of their network to spammers, often making $5000 or more per day in the process.

Botnets in recent years have grown considerably in size. The Conficker botnet for instance was said to have control of up to 10 million infected machines.

Malicious software is usually used to recruit new PCs into the botnet. This may include exploiting browser or operating system vulnerabilities, or by embedding viruses into legit software that users install on their systems.