Fight Spam

As an internet user, you probably have a mailbox. And if you do, you are also probably bothered by the plague of the net: the spam.

Most of the companies providing mailing services also provide spam filters. Those filters are getting better and better, but to me, all of this could be avoided by following several good practices. And when I check my mailbox, I am still very surprised to see how many friends of mine are still unaware of those practices.

Here below are what I consider to be common sense to use a mailing service. If everyone followed them, I guess spamming would not be a problem anymore 🙂

The key is to remember your email address IS private, and so are the address of your friends. Do not disclose it to anyone you don’t trust. Only provide your real address to well-known/trusted  websites. When not sure, give an alternate account.

If you have a website or a blog, NEVER use a mailto link. There are tweaks to make it unreadable by bots, but I would not rely on those so much. If the coder behind a bot really wants to make his bot accurate, it is not that hard to make it recognize patterns. For the same reason, I don’t recommend to use manual tweaks neither (like my_email[AT]my_website.com). If you want to be contacted from a website/blog, ALWAYS use a contact form.

Chain mails are one of the worst thing for your privacy : when you receive a chain mail, there are already a lot of contacts in the To: or CC: field. Plus, when you forward, all those contact will be displayed directly in the body. While 99% of people will not care, just think what happens when this kind of mail reaches someone selling address list/spamming… he didn’t need to do anything, and received by mail a fresh list of hundreds of contact. And you may not have such evil friends, but who knows about your friends’friend’sfriends? (it only requires 2 forwards, afterall). To avoid this, there are two things you can do very easily: First, always remove all the email adresses you can see in the email’s body. It takes a second, and all those people will be grateful. Then, and this is true for any mail you want to send to many people, Use BCC instead of To: or CC:. BCC will send the mail as a blind copy. As a result, the people who’ll receive your message will only see “undisclosed recipients”. And even in the mail’s headers, there won’t be any email address.

There are others ways to fight spam. However, the practices I detailed in this post are easy to do, and don’t require to install anything.

So let’s try to make the web a better place together!