By Daniel Tynan
(3/25/02)

Waging war against unwanted e-mail
So, I'm checking e-mail on my home PC, and, as always, I feel like I spend more time deleting spam than reading legitimate messages. The cursor lands on what's clearly a pornographic ad in my in-box, and before I can say "The Devil in Miss Jones," let alone hit Delete, the message launches my browser and delivers a pop-up ad featuring a healthy young woman in a state of advanced undress.

OK, fine. Normally, such things wouldn't bother me. But on this day, my five-year-old son is in the office with me. I quickly close the browser and make up some lame fatherly excuse. Privately, however, I decide that this is the last straw. It's time to fight back.

A fruitless battle?
That's when I discovered the ugly truth: the reason spam hasn't gone away is that the tools we use to fight it suck big-time.

I first tried applying the filtering tools inside Outlook Express, which seemed easy enough: select Tools > Message Rules > Mail > New, then fill in the blanks for the rule's Conditions and Actions. I created a rule to scan the subject and body of each message that arrived in my in-box for certain objectionable words (such as sex, Viagra, naked, mortgage, and IRS), then send the offending messages to a folder where I could review them later. I added a name for the rule and ran it on the messages already in my in-box, which I knew contained at least 100 pieces of unadulterated spam.

The rule found three messages, but it also quarantined a dozen perfectly legit pieces of mail. When I searched my in-box manually, I found scores of messages that the rule should have caught. So much for Microsoft's e-mail filters. (To be fair, I also ran a test on Netscape Mail 6.1's message filters. Same story there; they didn't do squat.)

Advanced weaponry
Screw the mail clients; it's time for a dedicated antispam utility. I decided to try AvirMail 1.7, because it's one of the newest and most popular antispam utilities on CNET's Download.com. Plus, it's free.

AvirMail runs separately from your e-mailer and, as freeware goes, is pretty good, once you figure out its ins and outs. (Antispam settings are hidden under the Extra tab, for example.) As with most spam killers, AvirMail fetches mail from the server and flags potential spam so that you can review and delete it before it lands in your in-box. AvirMail doesn't read HTML mail, so there's no way a message can, say, launch an unscheduled anatomy lesson in your browser. You can also tell it to simply kill off any mail that contains certain keywords.

The problem? Once you kill the messages, they're gone forever--which means you'd better have great confidence in the program's ability to separate spam from mail that you want. Or you can simply review every piece of mail inside AvirMail, then pick the ones to delete. But since that's what I already do in Outlook Express, it seems like a lot of extra work for very little payoff.

Jason and the Spam-o-nauts
Now what? I called Jason Catlett, president of Junkbusters, a Web site that offers advice for combating spam. He said that, in most cases, you should send the spammer a letter charging $10 for every piece of junk e-mail he or she sends you, then sue in small-claims court if the spammer fails to pay. Check out the sample letters available on the Junkbusters site.

Catlett's response was surprising. The usual advice is to never reply to spammers, because doing so verifies that your e-mail address is active, making it a good target for more spam. But Catlett said that most spammers are too lazy and stupid to track responses to their mail; they're just in it for a quick buck. The idea is to make it economically unattractive to bug you.

"These guys can send out hundreds of thousands of messages for about $50," he said. "They only need to find one sucker in 10,000 to make the operation economical."

Unfortunately, really nasty spammers, like the clowns who sent me the porn ad, are fly-by-night operators who use phony addresses and run sites by camping out on other people's servers, then packing up and moving to a different server a few hours later.

In such cases, Catlett said, your options are limited. You can change your e-mail address and hope the spammers won't find you again--not very attractive or practical. You can lobby Congress to get serious about antispam legislation, as it did in the early '90s when junk faxes were banned. Or you can learn to live with spam.

Me, I'm not done fighting yet. Stay tuned.

Reduce your spam intake
You can't completely eradicate spam from your e-mail, but you can make dealing with it a lot more palatable. Here are a few suggestions:

Get smart. Take a course in spam self-defense from CNET's "Take back the Net" and study Junkbusters' junk mail FAQ.

Lighten your e-mail load. Odds are that you get a lot of e-mail newsletters you never read. Sort your in-box by sender and look for newsletters. If you haven't read the last five issues of one, it's time to unsubscribe. This will make it easier to weed out true spam.

Delete before opening. You can spot most spam messages just by looking at their subject lines. Delete such messages before opening them. Some mail contains cookies, Web bugs, or scripts that, if opened, send a message to spammers signaling that you're a live one.

Close the window, you fool. Outlook Express's and Netscape Mail's preview windows make it easy to get a quick peek at your messages as they roll in, but this isn't always a good thing. Previewing a message can signal to a spammer that the message was read (see explanation above). To close this window in Outlook Express, select View > Layout, then uncheck the box marked Show Preview Pane. To do the same in Netscape, pull down the View menu from inside your in-box and uncheck Message.

Don't buy anything advertised via spam. If you do, at best, you're helping fund a nasty marketing practice; at worst, you're setting yourself up to be ripped off. As Catlett put it, "Anyone who sends a check to a spammer should undergo consumer credulity counseling."