Spam Filtering, Filters, SpamCop Spamming

Could Spam Destroy the Web? It's Worse than you could Imagine!

Title	Subject
Spam Kills	Spammers Endanger Honest Businesses
Can Spam!	UCE is Bad News
Spam Fighting Toolkit	Resources for The Serious Spam Fighter
No Spam News	Spam Issues in The News
Spam Fighter Script	Try This to Keep them at Bay
Spammers and Spamming Abuses	Foolishness Abounds
Spambots: Hiding Email Addresses with unicode	HTML resources for Stopping Spambots
SpamProofing Your Life!	Techniques to Reduce Harvesting Emails
Spam Filtering	Cost is Negligible when Compared to Time Lost
Spam Costs! Beyond Annoyance!	There ARE True Costs To Spam
SpamCops Abuses	Knee-Jerk Jerks
More SpamCop Problems	Idiots on Patrol
Why the SpamCop Blocking List is Harmful	A Reasoned Rational Exposé
List Owners, Beware the SpamCop Vigilantes!	The Ultimate Hate Crime Online
Is Your Email Mistaken for Spam?	Simple precautions to prevent filtering

IS YOUR E-MAIL MISTAKEN FOR SPAM?
Tim North, http://www.scribe.com.au/ebooks.html

How many e-mail messages do you receive in a week? How many of these are unsolicited advertising (spam)? If you're anything like me, the answer to both questions is "Too many!"

An unfortunate side effect of this tide of spam is that many people now delete any message that they suspect of being spam without reading it. This means that your e-mail's subject line will make or break you.

A good subject line is vital to prevent your e-mail being inadvertently dismissed as spam by some readers.

It is even more important when you consider the increasing use of rule-based e-mail filters that use very unforgiving software to classify incoming messages as spam or not-spam.

Here then are some simple tips to help you prevent your e-mail being mistaken for spam:

1. Don't use money in the subject line; e.g. Can we cut $500 from the budget? Many of your readers will have spam filters than kill off anything with a dollar sign in the subject line.

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By Tom Geller
Executive Director, SpamCon Foundation

I GET A LETTER EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE from someone asking about "postal spam" or "telephone spam". These letters are generally of two types:

• "Spam's annoying, but what really bothers me is when marketers call at dinnertime."
• "Spam's annoying, but paper junk mail kills trees and fills my REAL mailbox."

Sometimes these correspondents ask what they can do to stop postal and phone solicitations, in which case I refer them to Jason Catlett's amazingly thorough Junkbusters site http://www.junkbusters.com .

Just as often, they're angry that anyone would be upset by a little spam. After all, the argument goes, spam takes the place of those more-invasive forms of marketing. Phones must be answered; paper mail must be carted to the trash. But with spam all you have to do is "hit delete", right? (There was even a rumor that antispam activists were part of a secret "lumber cartel" to ensure that marketers would continue to send "tree-based" paper mail!)

http://info.astrian.net/jargon/terms/l/Lumber_Cartel.html
http://come.to/the.lumber.cartel
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/5362/cartel.html


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Spambots - Hiding Email Addresses with Unicode
by Richard Lowe, Jr.

In many instances you will want to put your email address on your website, even if you provide a form as a contact method. This is useful because it increases the number of ways that someone can contact you. Why is that important? Because presumably if you have a website you are attempting to communicate with the world - and communication goes both ways. If you have a commercial site then the answer should be obvious - someone may want to purchase something.

Another reason to put an email address directly on your web page is for people to request information via autoresponder. These allow your visitors to click a simple mailto link and get your promotional materials or articles in their email inbox.

The problem with directly including your email addresses on your page is spam harvesters. These a programs created by scum and run by ignorant or unethical fools. What they do is search through the internet, looking at web sites and pages for email addresses to add to those million email address collections that you see advertised (mostly in spam) all over the place.

There is really no ironclad way to prevent these bottom-feeders from scanning your web site for email addresses. There are a number of techniques, however, to make it a little more difficult for them.

One of these is to code your email addresses in something called Unicode.

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