If you use email regularly, there is a good chance that you get an inbox full of junk email or “spam” every morning trying to sell you mortgages, fertility enhancers and kitchen sinks. Some of this unsolicited mail may also come from adult sites, some of it fairly strong, if not pornographic. This is even more likely if your email address is published on your company’s website because there are webbots crawling the internet, harvesting email addresses from sites and compiling them into huge mailing lists that are then sold to other companies ad infinitum.
A recent European study estimated the annual cost of spam to users as being 110 bn euros. A recent article in the Guardian Online supplement estimated the cost in time as being 20 hours per user per year. Multiply that up across a small company with just 10 employees and even on a minimum wage of £4.10 ph that’s £820 per year : a big drain for something you haven’t even asked for.
There are, however, several ways to fight back. One method for those who do have their email addresses published on the net is to prevent the spider programs from adding you to their lists in the first place. Here at the AKRI we have considered 2 methods for achieving this. One is to render your address as a graphic with a link under it and another is to encode as ASCII, both of which will be legible to humans, but not to web robots. As a general rule we believe that using graphics to represent text isn’t the best solution so we have opted for the ASCII route. A site that will produce the ASCII version of an email address is http://www.wbwip.com/wbw/emailencoder.html . All you need to do is to type your email address into the box provided and a script will return the ASCII version. E.g. lee@akri.org becomes :
lee@a
kri.org
All email addresses on akri.org are now represented this way.
Encoding email addresses is however not a full solution to the problem : Dreamweaverfever demonstrates a simple script that can be used by email harvesters to get around encoded email addresses. Backword gives rundown on various extra precautions that can be taken and argues that it should be possible to reduce the amount of spam by adopting ceratin strategies even if it isn't possible to prevent it entirely.
But what about all those lists that already have your address? A mail filter program such as Mailwasher is a good solution in this case. Mailwasher intercepts spam email before your mail program even sees it. It cross checks all your email against internal blacklists and whitelists that you can add to and cross checks against blacklists on centralised servers. When you get mail that isn’t on your own list it suggests that it may be spam and you get the option to either delete it and/or bounce it back to it’s origin. The bounce feature doesn’t just send a reply it sends a user unknown message that can fool the mailing programs into thinking you don’t exist and can get you removed from those lists. You can set it up for any number of email accounts and it’s FREE! I’ve been running it for some months now, but after only 2 weeks of usage I was getting 1 or 2 spams a day where I was getting 30 or more before. Mailwasher can be downloaded free from http://www.mailwasher.net.