,
Spammed if you don t!
U.S. Senator Charles Schumer’s bill
SB1231 to initiate a national No-Spam
Registry has been read twice and referred to
the Committee on Commerce, Science and
Transportation, but appears to have only one
co-sponsor and has seen little action since
June 6, according to the U.S. Senate website,
as compared to federal “opt-out” resolutions
such as Rep. Richard Burr’s bill HR2214
with 33 co-sponsors and activity in the House
as recent as July 8.
More locally, in January, Oregon
Attorney General Hardy Myers requested a
bill (SB121) pushing an Oregon do-not-e-
mail registry, but according to Oregon Senate
Judiciary Committee Bill Taylor, who repre-
sents Senate Bill 910, another “opt-out” ap-
proach that moved smoothly through the
Senate, concerning the existence of other
current Oregon legislation regarding unso-
Do’s and Don’ts
spreading Spam
A spammer harvests valid e - mail addresses using a
1. Software systematically
guesses e-mail addresses
and opens a connection to
an unsecured “open
proxy server.”
4. Software sorts the
responses and adds the
valid addresses to
the spammer’s
mailing list.
drphil2@oprah.co
drphil1@oprah.com
drphil2@oprah.com
drphil3@oprah.com
drphil4@oprah.com
drphil5@oprah.com
drphil6@oprah.com
2. The open proxy server,
which disguises the
spammer’s identity, relays
requests for verification of
each of the addresses.
DO: Use “plus addressing” (offered at
EFN) if you care about who’s giving out
your e-mail address. Here’s how it works:
drphil1@oprah.com
Get an account, with an e-mail of, for ex-
drphil2@oprah.com
ample, nospam@efn.org. What’s different
drphil3@oprah.com
with plus addressing is that nospam1,
drphil4@oprah.com
nospam2, nospam3 and so on will also be
drphil5@oprah.com
sent to you, only they’ll each come into in-
drphil6@oprah.com
dividually labeled folders. Next, when you
sign up for a Victoria’s Secret card and
they ask for your e-mail, you give them
one of those plus addresses, such as
nospam14. If you ever get a spam e-mail
sent to the nospam14 folder, you know
which organization sold or shared your e-
mail, and therefore where not to buy your
panties.
DON’T: Register software or other prod-
ucts, or buy products that require you to
enter your e-mail, without reading the fine
print. Many of these companies put you on mailing lists, which theoretically could circulate
forever. Send your e-mail address into the world at your own spam peril.
DO: Check the address of incoming e-mail. Some e-mail from sites that look just like Ebay or
Penpal may ask you to re-enter your account or credit card information because they misplaced
it. You might notice that the return address isn’t www.penpal.com, but instead it’s something
nearly identical, like www.penpaI.com. A general ground-rule is that once you’ve entered per-
sonal information, a company is never supposed to ask you for it again.
“ dictionary attack .”
licited e-mail, “if there is (any other bill than
SB910), it’s not active.”
While a do-not-e-mail registry sounds at-
tractive, anti-spam experts fear it could be a
disaster. First, one reason that do-not-call
registries seem to work is that most solicita-
tion calls are made from inside the country.
Abusers are and will be easier to track and
prosecute. Some say that the great majority
of spam is already shuttled off-shore before it
comes back in, through unsecured, trail-ob-
scuring proxies. Secondly, a do-not-e-mail
registry would consist of a list of e-mails.
A big, fat, juicy, long list.
As to the opinion of whether a spammer
would use the list, well, the answer is yes, but
perhaps not for the reason you think.
“They’re never going to follow the rules,”
said VanDevender. “There are spammers out
there who have several millions of dollars
DON’T: Reply to spam e-mails. If you do,
some spammers will know they have a
3. The open proxy server
“live” one, and keep spamming, sell or
routes responses
share your e-mail address.
to the verification
DO: Use spam filters built into your mail
requests back to
program. Outlook Express, for example,
the spammer.
has filters to keep out all e-mails containing
certain words. If you get a lot of spam, go to
drphil1@oprah.com
the “Tools” menu, pull down to “Junk Mail
drphil2@oprah.com
Filter” and raise the “sensitivity” of your
drphil3@oprah.com
filter. If you’re afraid certain messages
drphil4@oprah.com
wont get through, add desired incoming ad-
drphil5@oprah.com
dresses to your address book, and they’ll
drphil6@oprah.com
make it to your inbox. Outlook Express also
provides you with a box to enter domain
names, such as “Excite,” or “Hotmail,” so
that all e-mails originating from those do-
mains are allowed passage (Pull down the
“Tools” menu and select “Rules.”)
DON’T: Publish your e-mail on the web as a
hot link. Each time you do gives web-
crawling programs that much more of a
chance to find your address.
DO: Use this great timesaver: When you come to work in the morning, or whenever you’ve got
a loaded inbox, select or highlight ALL the e-mails in your inbox. Then, instead or going
through and eliminating spam one at a time, use the “Apple” key (on PCs it’s the “control” key)
and the mouse to de-select just the legitimate e-mails. When you’ve selected all the good e-
mails, hit “delete”and the spam will disappear all at once. At work this cut my daily spam time
down from a half-hour to about five minutes.
DO: Read our bizarre spam terminology.
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JULY 31, 2003 13