Spam Filtering

In a relatively short amount of time email has become an integral part of our lives, but just as we reap the benefits of email, so do the same solicitors who have filled our U.S mailboxes with tons of unwanted paper over the years. What would cost marketers, both legitimate and fraudulent, a considerable amount of time and money to accomplish through the U.S. Mail can now be done in a few minutes with virtually no cost. Unsolicited mail, more commonly known as "spam," is an unfortunate consequence of email.

Although there is no sure proof method of eliminating spam altogether, the tips included below will help you to reduce it to a manageable and less irritating level.

Do's and Don'ts

Spam Robots or Spiders are programs that “crawl” the Internet, searching web pages for email addresses or “mailto” tags. Once found, the email addresses are added to private spam lists or even to bulk email CDs. To prevent these SpamBots from ever finding your email address, follow these tips:

• Don’t enter your email address into guest books.
• Never respond to spam with a request to remove your name from their mailing list.
• If possible, remove your email address from any web pages.
• If you must include your email address on the web, camouflage it by using a convention such as “joels at andrew dot cmu dot edu”. Don’t use the standard html “mailto:” tag. There are JavaScripts that eliminate the need for this tag (see the Spam Overview document).
• If you must maintain a web page of email addresses, restrict it to one page. You can limit the number of SpamBots from indexing the page by using a meta tag (see the Spam Overview document).