Fight Spam! Spam Tips and Tricks to Prevent Spam and Fight 419 Spammers

We're all sick of getting spam emails. From Viagra spam, to fake bank account spam and loan programs, to our long-lost Nigerian aunt who wants to send us 42 billion dollars, our email accounts are spammed to death. These spam emails cause our inbox to fill up, give us a headache and make us use Internet bandwidth that can be better spent. This page gives you a little information on how you can fight back against spam. I am by no means a computer professional but these tips should help the average computer user fight spam. The first section is for webmasters who can install spam fighting tools on their websites, and the second section is for the average civilian user as well.

If you have a website, don't ever, ever, post your email address as a link. I'm amazed so many people still do that. The majority of spam email addresses are harvested by spam bots, little spider-like computer programs that follow links from site to site, looking for a "mailto:" link like feedback@xyzEmails.com. When a spam harvesting bot finds a link like that, it adds it into its database to sell and send spam to. Most spam bots see your webpage as code, not visually as a human does. They look for the 'at' @ symbol followed by a domain, such as 123@123.com. The 'mailto' html link is a dead giveaway that it is seeing an email address. Instead, give your email address as "feedback (at) xyzEmails (dot) com. Yes, this means your visitors will have to manually type in your email address. If they really want to contact you, they'll do that regardless.

If you must make your email a clickable link, use a Javascript spam prevention code, such as this one:

If you own your own website, you can help fight spam by installing what's called a honeypot to snare spam bots. The one I use is called WPoison, from http://www.monkeys.com/wpoison/ . This is a GREAT little tool, the best I've found, and the monkeys at monkeys.com did a great job explaining what it's about and how to use it.

A honeypot is a fake email generator, which creates a fake web page solely for the purpose of ensnaring spam bots. You can see the one installed on this page at http://tigerseyedowsing.com/cgi-bin/chatters.pl to understand what it looks like. In the case of WPoison, the entire page is full of randomly generated fake email addresses with links at the bottom. Those links take the spam bot - surprise - right back to another copy of the WPoison page. Tricky, eh? The spam bot stumbles across the page, thinks it has found a winner (a honeypot of emails) which it then adds to its database, and then follows the links to find more fake emails. What this does is create havoc for the spammer, as when he sends out mass emails to these bad addresses, many will bounce and flood his email account with bounced email notices, which will drive him insane. It will also render his list of emails (which will of course include good, real email addresses like yours and mine) unsellable, because other spammers won't want a spam email database full of nonexistent email addresses. I only wish we could know how many bots we affect with the tool.

Installing WPoison is fairly easy if you're used to FTP. Simply name the .cgi script to something unique, and upload it to your cgi-bin folder. After that, create some invisible links on your website that normal users wouldn't see to the honeypot. You can make a link called "contact" to the page and then change the text color to match the background color (very easy if your site background is white). The next time spam bots crawl your webpage, they'll hit the honeypot and be done for.

All the monkeys require is the use of their logo on your homepage, which helps spread the word to other webmasters. If you don't want to do all this, you can feel free to link to my honeypot http://tigerseyedowsing.com/cgi-bin/chatters.pl from your web page. Or your MySpace, or blog... you get the idea.

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REPORT SPAM! Fight spam by signing up at www.SpamCop.net. Send them some money too, if you can afford it. SpamCop is a free service which allows you to report spam whenever possible. After signing up, SpamCop gives you a unique email address to forward your spam to. When spam arrives in your email, forward it as an attachment within two days to the email given (save it in your address book) and SpamCop will process it. They will send back an email with a link to click, at which it will tell you if any spam abuse email addresses were found to report to. It works and is a great resource for letting network administrators know someone is sending out spam so their account can be researched and possibly terminated. Keep reporting spam as much as possible.

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STOP USING INTERNET EXPLORER. Please see http://www.jms1.net/ie.shtml for more information.

"eWeek says "Internet Explorer is too dangerous to keep using".
ZDNet AnchorDesk goes so far as to say "Bail on Internet Explorer--now".
Another ZDNet article offers a reason WHY there's so much malware (malicious software) floating around- because hackers are trying to take over as many machines as possible, and then SELL the use of these hacked machines to whoever wants to use them- especially spammers.
MSN's "Slate" web site is even getting into the game... while they don't go so far as to explicitly say "stop using IE" (they are owned by Microsoft, after all) they do give a pretty fair treatment of why somebody would want to stop using it.
Firefox Leaves No Reason to Endure Internet Explorer, listed on Yahoo news, and written by a die-hard Microsoft fan. I love how it starts- "Internet Explorer, you're fired."

Get firefox. Yes, it's 100% free.

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I have newly discovered http://www.aa419.org/vampire/ladvampire.php which is a site geared toward killing 419 (Nigerian Scam) websites. This site is slightly more underhanded I suppose, but has an interesting concept. aa419.org has an extensive database of websites which are proven to be fraudulent 419 Nigerian Scam sites (fake bank sites, loan sites, etc) who send out spam and, worse, scam money out of web users. aa419 attempts to temporarily put these spam websites down by offering a portal page of 18 of such spam sites, and by leaving the web page open, you can suck the available bandwidth from these pages and cause them to go offline. This costs the fraudulent webmasters time and money (mostly money) and gives them a major headache, which hopefully lets them consider a new line of work. You can leave the aa419.org site open in the background while your computer is online to continually pull the scamming webpages, and the title bar conveniently displays the transfer rate at which you're helping to put these sites down. This is a collaborative effort and the more users who find this page and load it, the better the effect will be. The only concern is that the sites are able to detect your IP addresses though the aa419 site. They can turn you in to your ISP for attacking their site.