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.

Project Honey Pot is a system designed with those who receive spam in mind. What this system basically does is sit on a site and watch for email harvesters. When it finds an email harvester, the honey pot logs information about the harvester into the Project Honey Pot system. This information is then built up into various sets of statistics that are used in court to prosecute spammers. One of the things that makes Project Honey Pot cool is that it shows all this data on their website for the world to see. This allows those curious about their own IPs to check and see if they are considered a spammer. It also offers information on various IPs and statistics such as the average amount of emails sent to the honey pot.

Website owners can do one of three things to help Project Honey Pot catch spammers. A honey pot can be added to any website which will watch for and log any suspicious data on that site. This is for those who have a web host and are willing to install the honey pot script onto their site. Those who don’t have their website hosted or don’t want to install a honey pot can install a QuickLink. When a bot visits a site, they likely visit other sites that the original site is linked to in order to find as many email addresses as possible. A QuickLink is a hidden, secret link that only bots can see and visit. The QuickLink will take the bot to a site that does have a honey pot installed. Another thing that webmasters can do is donate an MX record to the project. What this does is give Project Honey Pot an email address to receive spam. Project Honey Pot will use this email address to see what kind of spam the harvesters are sending among many other statistics. This option is for webmasters who have their own domain name.

Project Honey Pot is a completely free service that survives on donations and tshirt sales through CafePress. They also offer various other services such as a directory where users can look up information about various IPs, including IPs that are known to belong to dictionary attackers.

This requires some explanation. The user signs up and picks a username during the setup. The domain for his email is then created automatically using the formula @username.otherinbox.com. Every email alias that is put in front of the @ will automatically create a new filter and folder for that alias.

This effectively means unlimited email addresses for every user which are harder to guess than those from similar services such as Gmail or Yahoo Mail. This does however mean that every email will reach the inbox and that a new folder and filter will be created for them automatically.

Otherinbox can be used to send emails from the available or newly created aliases as well. The real question is if someone would really need Otherinbox. It is not a problem to create a new webmail account and create filters for marketing and networking websites. The only difference is that Otherinbox provides automatic filter generation while they have to be created manually using the other webmail services.

Is that enough to make the service worthwhile? That’s up for you decide. The Otherinbox team provided Ghacks readers with 25 email addresses. Just head over to http://beta.otherinbox.com/signup/ghacksnet and signup. The first 25 to signup get the beta account.

All kinds of protection have been created to prevent this from happening. Some suggest using images instead of text, many obscure their emails in the hope that the bots will not be able to identify the right one and others are not publishing their mail at all.

Tinymail steps in and tries to be a barrier between your email address and the Internet. It does that by linking your email address to a Tinymail webpage which becomes your profile page. Instead of publishing your email on the web you embed the Tinymail code that is created after linking the email to a Tinymail email address.

The Tinymail code is showing part of the real email address and a link to the profile page which is only accessible if the user enters a captcha. If he does that he can take a look at the real email.

The idea itself is nice but it has two flaws in my opinion.The first is that it adds another step to the contact process. That might not be a problem if you desperately are trying to contact one but it is definitely a problem for other forms like providing feedback on a product. Users might give up in frustration and prefer to spend their time elsewhere.

The second is the captcha protection. Captchas have been broken in the past and once it is broken it could become a haven for a email collector who stored all those Tinymail emails in a database waiting for the right moment to decipher them all.

It would be nice if the email link could be deleted again after usage for a certain time, maybe even let it run out automatically after x days where x is a figure that the user can define in the options.

The user would create an Akapost email account at their website and link it to one of his real email accounts. Whenever he wanted to signup on a site he would use the Akapost email account which would forward all incoming mails to his account.

Mails that he wanted to send could be send to Akapost first which would forward them to the email recipient. This effectively means that no sender or website is able to uncover the real email address of the user. Akapost featured a few additional options, just read my initial article if you are curious.

Free accounts can be created at Akapost which are good for one email link. I had a chat with the guys at Akapost and they told me that they would give me five free account upgrades to Akapost Plus which is good for 5 Akapost email addresses and 10 links.

The service usually costs $22.95 per year but five lucky Ghacks readers pay nothing to get it. You need to have an Akapost username. If you want to upgrade your account let me know in the comments. I pick five commenters in the coming days who will get the free upgrade. Regular commenters and visitors will be precedented.

It might seem like a solid trick unless you think about it for a second. If I know that there are two email addresses on those two Google domains that lead to the same user the spammer could know as well and most likely will. So, even though you use one email for private matters and the other for everything else Mr. Spammer will simply add a script that sends mails to both Google accounts automatically.

The only real way that works in my opinion are separate email accounts with no connection whatsoever. Using one account with those two email addresses is simply not reducing the amount of spam that you receive.

I bet you have asked yourself the question numerous times if an email was legit or fake. I know that I did and I analyzed the email to find out if the sender was really the person or company that it claimed to be.

The software Trend Micro eMail ID which I spotted over at Raymonds blog aids the user under certain circumstances. The eMail Id tool is a browser add-on for Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox that supports several webmailers like Yahoo Mail, Gmail and Hotmail.

Email ID scans incoming mails from supported companies displaying a status icon afterwards which tells the user if the email is legit or fake. Moving the mouse over the icon reveals additional information about the email received.

Trend Micro eMail ID is an easy to use security tool that does not require configuration at all. It does have some limitations though. First, it only works with Firefox and Internet Explorer and only several webmailers plus Microsoft Outlook Express 6.0 and second it supports only US companies at the moment.

If you are from Europe for instance you will not find this tool that useful because you normally do not receive that many emails from those companies from the United States.

One software that is able to crawl a single page, a website and even linked sites is 1st Email Address Spider. It costs $130 but everyone may freely test the software which has some restrictions in place. It is nevertheless sufficient for our cause. Once installed you simply enter the url of the website or page that you want to check, select if outgoing links should be checked as well and enter login information if needed.

The tool then connects to all webpages and links it can find and collects emails from those pages. It’s really interesting to see that websites advocating that you should conceal your email addresses are actually revealing lots of emails on theirs.

The best way to not give away your email address would be to not include it on any of your websites. Add a contact form instead that visitors can use to get in contact with you. If you have to publish an email address you should consider using an image, or more than one, to display it.

Some bots however are good enough to be able to process images as well.

Read More:

123 Email Address Spider

Image spam on the other hand is on the rise because of several new spam techniques that make it pretty hard for the filters to automatically recognize spam.

The left image is an example of a typical image that appears in spam emails. The following techniques were used in this mail to bypass the spam filter. The first obvious element are random pixels that overshadow some part of the image. This is done to create random images which can bypass spam filters even though an image with the same information arrived before in your mailbox.

Other options to achieve a similar effect include using colors that look the same to the human eye but not to the computer, and randomizing processes to create unique images.

Some spammers use different layers for a set amount of pixels which makes it incredibly hard to to use hash values to determine spam images.

The last aspect of image based spam emails is random text that is copied before or – more often – after the image. The text itself has nothing to do with the intention of the spammer. It is solely used to simulate a normal mail with a set amount of neutral and positive words.

The image on the left shows another image that is often used to bypass spam filters. It uses random colors much like the previous image used random pixels that made the image unique.