Defeat Spam
Spam is defined as unsolicited or junk e-mail advertising for some product sent to a mailing list or newsgroup. Spam has been described as the "killer" application (in the negative sense). Draft legislation introduced into Australia's Federal Parliament on September 18, 2003 is intended to ban the sending of unsolicited commercial electronic messages including email and SMS and would also ban harvesting of email addresses.
The October SPAM problem in Australia saw an average 30% increase in traffic with a peak increase of 80% at times and over 500,000 infected systems worldwide. Over 16,000,000 SPAM messages were received in Australia in 8 days. Pricing plans built around download limits bring home the implications of this lack of security in a very real way to users.
e-Security Australia www.eSecurityAustralia.com, a cluster established by the Queensland government in 2001, estimates SPAM productivity loss as very significant - 40,000 users receiving 200,000 unwanted emails a day (5 each!) will lose over 66,000 hours of productivity. 40,000 users receiving 20 SPAM emails of 5K each (think images, think PDFs) will use 146,000 Mb per annum. Storage and infrastructure costs to handle this junk have not been included.
There are three measures that you should take to prevent Spam.
- First of all if you use Microsoft e-mail products there are two excellent articles on how to filter out spam e-mail. These e-mail blocking, filtering, and managing features can be found at Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Outlook Express
- Second there are some good anti-spam products. But should staff worry about spam as well as viruses? We wanted our staff focussed on our core business. So we use a managed anti-spam service. Managed anti-spam systems route an organization’s email through an off-site filtering service. We recommend and use a managed anti-spam service called "SecurenceMail" provided by US Internet's Securence division. In fact we were so impressed that we became a sales agent for it. To learn more about it click here.
- Third, if you are a Web Developer, you can disguise e-mail addresses.
When an address has been posted on the public Web, it can potentially be viewed by hundreds of millions of users. People who develop spam lists exploit this feature by using address-harvesting programs to surf across thousands of web sites, collecting any e-mail addresses that they encounter. Most users have no idea that their addresses have been harvested until they begin receiving spam.
To obscure your e-mail address, or any other piece of text, try the free E-mail address encoder below.
This form will allow you to encode your e-mail address through the use of character encoding to transform your ASCII e-mail address into its equivalent decimal value. Simply enter an e-mail address in the first text box, and click the encode button. Then highlight and copy the resulting code produced in the second text box. Just replace all instances of your e-mail address on your pages with the code, and you won't have to worry about spam lists. Browsers display this encoded e-mail address on your site without any further action on your part.
For example on the web page find an e-mail address such as a@b.com
After the change to the source code for the web page, code that looks like this:
<a href="mailto:a@b.com">a@b.com</a>
It should look like this:
"<a href="mailto:a@b.com">
& #097;@b.com</a>"
Please note that we do not keep any E-mail addresses submitted.