Thursday 10 January 2008

Spam me if you dare...

Hi

You've come to the site of Auntie Spam, where I'm running a couple of experiments about SPAM. Yes, we all hate it, with the exception of the spammers themselves who make a mint out of preying on the vulnerable whilst pissing the rest of us off, so pop in here once in a while to see what we can do about them, if anything.

I'm going to start off with two simple aspects of spam - how it breeds and how to reduce it. For the first of these, I'm going to open what is affectionately known as a honeypot. This will take the form of a totally unused email address that I will post right here for spammers to pick up. And the address I have chosen to sacrifice is: spamauntie@yahoo.co.uk. Let's see how long they take to bite!

Auntie's Lesson #1

Never post your email address on any website, whether it is your own website or something like facebook or the forums on www.donkey-groomer.com. It is a REALLY BAD IDEA. Don't say you weren't warned. The reason is that the spammers have software programs called spiders that crawl around the internet picking up email addresses and adding them to databases of millions of addresses that they can sell and use to mount spam campaigns.

The second thing I'll be looking at is an existing email address that I have which has been on the go for about 10 years, has been used for numerous mailing lists, special offers and surveys. Needless to say it is regularly receiving over 50 items of spam every day - I cleared it out before starting this post and there are already 2 messages in it. I'm going to see how effective the 'opt-out' options of these messages are. I fully expect most to be totally useless, but it will be interesting to see how quickly big brand names will remove me from their lists. I won't be publishing this email address here, as I want to see if I can genuinely start to reduce the level of spam in this account. I'll be naming and shaming the emailers who ignore their own opt-out links.

Auntie's Lesson #2

When you get a spam email, don't reply to it and don't even follow the opt-out link, if provided. In most cases all this will do is confirm that you're using a valid and live email address which the spammer can flag in his database as being confirmed.

Do pop back in for a cuppa in a few days and we'll see which low-life spammers have taken the bait.

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