Spam Filtering

In a relatively short amount of time e-mail has become an integral part of our lives, but just as we reap the benefits of e-mail, 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 e-mail.

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 e-mail addresses or “mailto” tags. Once found, the e-mail addresses are added to private spam lists or even to bulk e-mail CDs. To prevent these SpamBots from ever finding your e-mail address, follow these tips:

• Don’t enter your e-mail address into guest books.
  
• Never respond to spam with a request to remove your name from their mailing list.
• If possible, remove your e-mail address from any web pages.
• If you must include your e-mail 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 e-mail 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) .