Fight Spam!
Spam, or Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE/Spam), has become a plague for mail users on the Internet. Both as an individual and as a company or ISP there are things you can do. And the good news, it's generally free! So why not do it?
Most of the unwanted bulk email comes via so called open relays. These are very sloppy configured mail servers which allow anybody on the Internet to relay mail via them. These problems can easily be fixed!
General information
- FAQ for the newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email
- Fight Spam on the Internet!
- CAUCE - the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email
- ABUSE - Network Abuse Clearinghouse
- Fighting email spam and anti-UBE pointers
- OECD - Task Force on Spam
General Tools
When you get spam you may want to try to track down which open relay it came via. This paper by Ed Falk may help you. When you have the dotted IP address or the hostname you may want to check them out:
- DNSBL Lookup
- The Spamhaus Project
- Multi-RBL check
- SpamCop Blocking List
- SPEWS.ORG - Spam Prevention Early Warning System
- FAQ - Figuring out fake E-Mail & Posts
Tools for companies and ISPs
Most mail servers in use can use these services.
- The Open Relay DataBase (ORDB) - free DNS based service
- SpamCop - free DNS based service
- Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS) - commercial DNS based service
- Open Relay - How To Fix the Problem, from MAPS
- List of DNS-based Spam Databases
- SpamAssassin - free Perl tool (Unix and Windows)
- MailScanner - anti virus, anti spam etc.
What you can do
You should protect your email address. Spammers use various tools to harvest email addresses from web pages, usenet news, and other sources.
- Why Am I Getting All This Spam? - Research Report
- FAQ - How do spammers get people's email addresses ?
So what can you do? You can distort your email address in various ways.
- Munging - the most common way
- Encode the characters - less common
- Encrypt it - like I've done om the front page
Remember that when you munge your email address you should keep the top level domain (TLD) of the mail address or put .invalid at the end (see RFC 2606).
Tools for individuals
- SpamPal - pop proxy - free end user tool (Windows)
- MailWasher - free end user tool (Windows)
- SpamAssassin - free Perl tool (Unix and Windows)
- Pop3proxy - free Perl tool for SpamAssassin (Windows)
- MailScanner - anti virus, anti spam etc.