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How to Stop SPAM: Expert Tips

This is the 3rd and most advanced set of anti-spam tips in my 3 part article serious.  The other two are here:

  1. How to Stop SPAM: Basic Tips

  2. How to Stop SPAM: Advanced Tips

image If you want to stop spam… I mean really stop spam, it will take some set up effort and some mild, continuous effort (very mild), but in the long run, it will be WELL worth it.  You don’t have to be an expert computer user to do any of this, but you do need to follow directions and have patience.  The following expert tips are the 3rd and most advanced part in my 3 part series on putting an end to spam.  These 3 parts are NOT consecutive parts.  You can do any one of the 3, depending on how fortified you want to make your inbox.  The more fortified, the more work.  This part is the most work of the 3 and is also the most effective.  If you follow these steps, it will be a RARE occasion when (or IF) you ever receive another spam message.  I’ve been doing this for years and have only received a small handful (less than 10) spam messages in about 10 years!!!!  THIS REALLY WORKS!!!

Here we go:

  1. Buy a domain name.  They’re only like $10/year.  If you register for more than a year, the price/year goes down.  I recommend doing so via godaddy.com.  They’ve got good pricing and lots of features.
    1. If you’re not familiar with what a domain name is, that’s the part of a web address that ends in .com or .net or .org (or several others).  For example:  google.com is a domain name.  You can register your own name (if it’s not already taken).  If the name you want is taken, there’s an infinite number of them to choose from.
  2. Use Google hosted domains to set up GMail, but with YOUR OWN domain name (http://google.com/a), so say you registered JohnSmith.com, you can set up your GMail as me@JohnSmith.com, instead of JohnSmith12345@gmail.com.
    1. With your own domain, you still have all the cool, infinite aliases like you do with regular GMail (see How to Stop SPAM: Advanced Tips), plus you’ve got it on your own domain and plenty of other really cool features you DON’T get with regular GMail (did I mention this is all FREE??? except for the domain name registration, of course).

You can create up to 20 fully loaded E-Mail accounts on your free domain hosted account (each with their own inbox and each with their own log in and calendar, and Google docs, etc…).  If you need more, you can pay a nominal fee to Google.

Each of these 20 accounts can have up to 25 aliases (in addition to the infinite plus sign (+) on-the-fly addresses I described in How to Stop SPAM: Advanced Tips).  These 25 aliases do NOT have a + sign in them.  So, you could have aliases like me@JohnSmith.com, you@JohnSmith.com, SomeOneElse@JohnSmith.com, etc… all going to the same account.  Remember, each of the 20 real accounts can have 25 additional aliases, which gives 26 ways to reach an account (without using the on-the-fly address scheme).  That gives you 520 unique addresses without using the on-the-fly (+) address scheme.  You can also have any (or all) of these accounts automatically forward their received mail to one account, that way you only have to check ONE account and not 20.

Utilize the tips in How to Stop SPAM: Advanced Tips with these new addresses on your own domain.

You can also have a catch-all address for your domain, in case you want to catch e-mail sent to non-existent addresses on your domain.  This is good if you enter a non-existent address on some website and forget to create its alias on your own domain.  You can also set up filters on the catch all, looking for e-mail addressed to certain addresses, and forward it to a certain account.  This is good if you run out of aliases (all 520 available), or if you’d prefer to just set up filters on the catch all instead of setting up aliases.

One fun thing to do is to set up once you’ve busted one of the web sites as a spammer (and you will), is to set up a filter for the address they’re sending you spam on and have it forwarded to their sales or help e-mail address and automatically deleted from your inbox.  Then, they’re just spamming themselves!  I’ve done this with both BellSouth and Sears.  If you sign up for e-mail notifications through any company, then decide you want to unsubscribe, many of them will intentionally delay it for “7 to 10 days for processing”.  This is a bunch of BS, and they know it.  They get you signed up instantly, they can unsubscribe you instantly.  Set up a filter to their sales and help addresses too.  They’re only annoying themselves.  It might also be fun to have spammer A’s spam forwarded to spammer B’s address and vice versa.

If you find these tips helpful, please leave a comment and let me know.  Or, if you have tips of your own, let the rest of us know.

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How to Stop SPAM: Advanced Tips

For BASIC tips on stopping Spam, read this article:

For expert tips on stopping spam, read this article:

image The best way to control spam, in addition to the basic practices here, is to have an unlimited supply of E-Mail addresses.  If you have a G-Mail account, you have that.  If you DON’T have a GMail account, I suggest you get one, pronto at http://gmail.com.

Once you have a GMail account, I recommend to NEVER give out that address.  If you already have a gmail account, you’ve almost certainly given it out. Sign up for a NEW account.  DO NOT give out this address to ANYONE.

From this point forward, you can make up new e-mail addresses on the fly.  For example, say your e-mail address is me@gmail.com.  Did you know that you can receive e-mail sent to me+whatever@gmail.com, or me+SomethingIMadeUp@gmail.com or anything else, as long as it starts with “me+” and ends with “@gmail.com”.  You don’t have to do anything at all to set this up.  It just works and you have an unlimited number of addresses.

So, the next part should be pretty obvious already, but just in case you didn’t catch on to what I’m about to suggest, here it is:

Whenever anyone asks for your e-mail address, make up a new one on the spot.  Suppose you have a friend named John Smith.  You would give him me+john.smith@gmail.com (or something to let you know, when you receive the e-mail, that it’s the address you gave to John Smith).  Whenever you go to a web site that needs your e-mail address, you can enter a new, unique e-mail address that ONLY that web site knows.  For example, say you’re going to www.PossibleScamSite.scam.  You could give them the e-mail address me+possiblescamsite.scam@gmail.com.  I also recommend added a few extra characters that no one could guess like me+PossibleScamSite.junk@gmail.com.  This way, no one can guess it.

Now, why should you not give out the primary address of me@gmail.com?  Because scammers can look at your address with the plus sign (+) in it and knowing how GMail works, can guess that your real address is me@gmail.com.  You should assume that this WILL happen.

Now, whenever you get e-mail, you can look at the TO address, and know for SURE who it’s FROM!  Even if they’re trying to fake the “from” address!!!  Also, if you start getting spam on any of your on-the-fly-created e-mail addresses, you’ll know for sure who’s responsible for letting it slip into the hands of spammers.  You can then do two things:

  1. Inform the person (or company) that they let your address slip into the hands of spammers.
  2. Create a filter in your GMail settings to automatically delete any e-mail sent to that on-the-fly address to stop it in its tracks.  If you want to continue receiving e-mail from the original party, you can give them a NEW address.  This may require you logging onto their web site and changing your e-mail address, or if it’s a friend, just give them a new one.

Why NOT give out your primary address?

Because, some scammers know about this feature of gmail and will EASILY know what your primary address is and will simply start spamming that, then you’re back at square one.  So, since you don’t give out this address, you KNOW that any e-mail you receive on it is 100% spam.  So, set up a filter in your GMail settings to automatically delete any e-mail sent to the primary address.  (check back here later for instructions on how to do that).

BEWARE OF REPLYING!!!!

If you receive an e-mail message sent to one of your made up addresses and you wish to reply, note that your reply address will be your PRIMARY address… you know, the one that you’ve set up a filter to delete any e-mail sent directly to it?  This is bad because if THEY reply back, they’re now sending it to the WRONG address and your filter automatically deletes it!  You need to configure your GMail to automatically change your reply-to address to the same address that the e-mail was sent to.  This requires a moderate amount of set up for each reply-to address you want to use.  I recommend doing this when you plan on replying, and not before hand for each and every on-the-fly address you’ve created, just to cut down on the amount of work.  (Check back soon for instructions on how to do this).

Now, you’ve got the following advantages:

  1. Your spam will drop to virtually zero (if not, completely zero!).
  2. Regardless of any forging attempts by the sender, you’ll know who’s responsible for leaking your address because of the TO address you received it on.
  3. In the extremely rare event that you actually get spam, you can stop it from that source immediately.
  4. You can identify which of your friends’ computer’s is infected with a spam virus and inform them, which will reduce the spread of the virus, help them clean up their computer, and reduce more spam to other people.

For expert tips on stopping spam, read this article:

If you find these tips helpful, please leave a comment and let me know.  Or, if you have tips of your own, let the rest of us know.

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How to Stop SPAM: Basic Tips

We all hate spam, especially those of us running our own E-Mail servers.  Here are some important tips for you, as a user, to stop that unwanted, unsolicited E-Mail:

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Here’s a real life example of how I used this technique to just busted Box.net for releasing my e-mail address to spammers:

First, some basics:

  1. Don’t ever enter your E-Mail address on any web form, unless you do the following:
    1. Find and READ their privacy policy (and you understand it and have determined that they actually are promising to never send you unsolicited e-mail and promise to never give your address or sell your address to anyone for any reason).  Note that MOST privacy statements do NOT state that they’ll do this.  Many of the privacy statements explicitly state that they WILL give our your E-Mail address.  This is why you HAVE to read it!!!!
    2. Is there a good reason for you to enter your e-mail address on that web site?  What are you gaining by giving your e-mail address to this site?  Is it worth the risk of spam?
    3. Have you ever heard of this site?  Is it reputable?  Do you trust them?  Are you SURE???
    4. If you’re signing up for something you really need, like online access to your bank, your utilities providers, etc…, it’s probably OK.  You should minimize or eliminate handing out your e-mail address on any other sites.
  2. If you participate in social web sites like Google+, Facebook, or MySpace, MAKE SURE you’ve set all of your privacy settings so that all your information is NOT available for ANYONE, except your direct friends.  DO NOT make your information available to friends of friends, and CERTAINLY not available to the general public.
  3. If you ever post a message in an online forum:
    1. DO NOT put your real e-mail address on there.
    2. If the online forum requires a registration first and requires your real e-mail address, consider NOT signing up.
  4. Never post your e-mail address on anything that’s publicly available on the internet, like job postings, resume posting, personal web sites, local web sites like churches, scouts, schools, etc…  Just because those sites are intended for local consumption doesn’t mean that the whole world can’t see it, and trust me, they DO!  Spammers have automated programs that scan EVERY PAGE of EVERY WEB SITE harvesting e-mail addresses.
  5. Ask your friends and family to NOT forward your e-mail to anyone else (like jokes and viral e-mail).  When they forward it, your e-mail address goes out to them all.  Most of these viral messages get forwarded to hundreds, if not thousands of people before your address is finally removed (if ever).  ANY of these people that have a virus that scans for e-mail addresses in their incoming and outgoing e-mail WILL harvest YOUR e-mail address.  Probably about 1/2 of all computers “out there” are infected.
  6. NEVER enter your e-mail address on an eGreeting card site.  Just DON’T use these sites… EVER!
  7. Ask your friends and family to never enter your e-mail address on any of these sites.
  8. Ask your friends and family to NEVER enter your e-mail address on ANY WEB SITE FOR ANY REASON!!!!  They think they’re doing you a favor by letting that web site send you a link to a page, but all they’re doing is adding your address to their spam list.  If they want to refer you to a web page, ask them to e-mail you the link directly from their own e-mail or NOT AT ALL!
  9. Remind your friends and family, AT LEAST once every 6 months about 7 & 8.
  10. If you leave a comment on a news story or a product review, make sure your e-mail address isn’t published with it.
  11. Don’t display images in e-mail.  Most mail programs (including webmail web sites) give you the option of NOT displaying images in e-mail where the image isn’t actually included in the e-mail, but is instead loaded from a website from within the e-mail when you view it.  The main reason companies send you e-mail with web link references to images, instead of embedding the images, is because they use unique image names that identify YOU when your e-mail program downloads them from their server.  Once that happens, they know YOU have just manually opened and viewed the e-mail.  If it’s spam, you’ve just verified to the spammer that your inbox is an active inbox.  Now you’re going to get MORE SPAM!!!!

For even MORE effective tips, check out this article:

For expert tips on stopping spam, read this article:

If you find these tips helpful, please leave a comment and let me know.  Or, if you have tips of your own, let the rest of us know.

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“Welcome to Windows Media Player” on Windows 7

This is not a “complaint’”, but merely a report of one of the many strange things going on with Windows 7…

Long after I installed Windows 7 (2 1/2 months after installing it), I opened a wav file from an e-mail message (it’s a voice-mail message via my VOIP provider), I got the following dialog box that’s only supposed to happen the first time you run Windows Media Player:

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(BTW, you should choose “Custom settings” and ensure that “Send unique Player ID to content providers” is unchecked as well as “I want to help make Microsoft software and services even better by sending Player usage data to Microsoft”.  I also recommend that under “History”, you uncheck everything.  You don’t necessarily want anyone that sits at your computer to be able to browse back at everything you’ve been watching or listening to.  Click on the cookies button and on the privacy tab, turn on the pop-up blocker and under InPrivate, check both boxes.)

I use Windows Media Player daily, so this is definitely not the first time I’ve run this… It’s more like the 1000th time.  Windows 7 seems to have a considerable amount of glitches in it.  Since it’s new, that’s to be expected.  This is not a complaint, just a documentation of some of the strange things that have been going on in Windows 7.  If anyone’s interested, this is from Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit Version 6.1.7600 with all of the updates as of 12:13 PM 10/23/2009 Eastern Time, with the exception of one pending “Microsoft – Input – Microsoft USB IntelliMouse Optical (IntelliPoint)” driver update and 34 optional foreign language packs.

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I also viewed my update history and see no updates relating to Windows Media Player in the past week.

Text from the dialog box to help with web searches:

Choose the initial settings for Windows Media Player.  You can change these settings in the Player later.

Recommended settings

Make Windows Media Player the default program for playing media, automatically download usage rights and media information to update your media files, and send usage data from the Player to Microsoft.  Set Media Giude as my active online store.

Custom settings

Customize privacy, playback, and online store settings.

Usage data will be sent to Microsoft if you use recommended settings, but the information will not be used to identify or contact your.

To learn more about Recommended settings, read the Privacy Statement online.