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E-MAIL, HOLD THE SPAM
"$$$ BECOME A MILLIONAIRE IN ONE MONTH!!!"

"UNIVERSITY DIPLOMAS FAST—LIKE NOW!!!"

"FREE MONEY!!!"

Do these e-mail subject lines look familiar?

They are taken from "spam," or unsolicited commercial e-mail, sent to my Hotmail e-mail account in the past few days. If you’re on the Internet and use e-mail, you probably get spam.

Internet service provider America Online says that some 40 percent of the 15 million pieces of e-mail it processes daily qualify as spam. The Gartner Group, an Internet research and analysis firm, estimates that one out of 10 e-mails sent worldwide is junk mail.

Not only is all this unwanted attention annoying, it can be costly as well. Spam can clog up your ISP’s network, slow down delivery of your e-mail and even cause servers to crash. Wireless device users, who often pay for access time by the minute, end up spending money to download spam.

And then there’s the content of most spam. According to the Gartner Group, one in four junk e-mails hawks pornography. One-third of the junk e-mails forwarded to the Spam Recycling Center, an antispam advocacy Web site, peddle bogus get-rich-quick schemes.

How do spammers get hold of your e-mail address? Unfortunately, it’s fairly simple.

Operations known as e-mail harvesters use sophisticated automated software to scour Web sites, online communities and chat rooms for e-mail addresses. Working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, these software programs compile huge lists of e-mail addresses, which are then saved on CD-ROM and made available for purchase by any would-be spammer. A CD-ROM containing about one million e-mail addresses can be purchased for $100 to $400, according to a November 1999 report in PC World magazine.

So what are you to do in the face of this onslaught of junk e-mail? While it’s nearly impossible to completely shield yourself from spam, there are a few measures you can take to keep it to a minimum:

– Make use of the e-mail filtering options offered by most ISPs. Although no filtering software can block all spam, many packages are quite effective in blocking most junk e-mail while letting legitimate e-mail through.

– Forward spam to your ISP. Most ISPs have a special e-mail address for reporting spam. You can also forward spam to the Spam Recycling Center (e-mail address "spamrecycle{at}ChooseYourMail.com"), which will forward the message to legal authorities and filtering software companies.

– Review the privacy policy of any Web site that requests your e-mail address. The site should guarantee that your address will remain private. If no privacy policy is posted, consider taking your business elsewhere.

– Use a free Web-based e-mail account from a company such as Hot-mail or Yahoo! for public postings to newsgroups and chat rooms and for Web site registrations. As this account fills up with junk e-mail, just empty the trash. Save your private e-mail address for correspondence with friends and trusted associates.

– Don’t respond to unsolicited e-mails. Many junk e-mails contain a link to remove yourself from the spammer’s mailing list. Unfortunately, these links are often used to confirm "live" e-mail addresses that will eventually find their way onto a CD-ROM mailing list.

Joe Hoyle, electronic media editor, ADA Publishing, a division of ADA Business Enterprises, Inc., "hoylej{at}ada.org".

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