I'm drowning in spam.
What can I do?
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom
here for AskLeo.com. I've got a lengthy
question with the original article for this, but the bottom line is that you
all understand that spam is a huge problem, and every so often we all feel
overwhelmed by the amount of spam that seems to be headed our way.
I want to go over what's in our control, what's not in our control,
and what are the things you can do and not do when dealing with spam.
One of the most important things I think
it's very critical to realize is simply this you cannot stop spam.
You can't.
It's headed your way.
All that you can do is understand what you can do with it when it arrives.
Now, that can take many different forms,
but it's on you to put into place or take the actions to deal with spam.
There's no making it go away.
Now, one thing I do want to point out here is that if spam is showing up in your spam
folder, that's the system working and working properly.
That's what's supposed to happen.
If you're getting
all concerned because you're getting tons of spam in your spam folder, stop.
That's the way it's supposed to be.
That's your system successfully identifying the spam as it arrives
and throwing it somewhere where you don't have to look at it.
If you were to completely ignore your spam
folder, then it would be as if you were getting no spam.
Now, to be fair, if you get spam in your inbox, you're getting spam.
If you get a lot of spam in your inbox, that's something we need to address.
Blocking doesn't work.
One of the go to reactions for many people is to say, hey, I got a piece of spam.
It's from so and so, I'm going to block them.
Doesn't work that way.
The problem is that spammers know this.
They know that you will block individual email addresses.
So every piece of spam probably comes from a different email address.
There's no blocking in the world that can keep up with that.
That's not how you deal with spam.
Spam filters are the approach.
Spam filters are what we need to rely on when we're dealing with spam.
What does a spam filter do?
It takes a look at the message.
It takes a look at all sorts of characteristics,
be it from the headers, you don't see the server that sent it,
where it was sent to, how many people it was sent to.
Are you cseed or Bcceed?
What is the content of the message?
Are there any trigger words in the message?
Are there things about the message
that would have it be considered spam by most people?
Spam filters will basically evaluate each
message as it comes in against a set of criteria and make a decision.
Yep, this one is spam.
We'll throw it in the spam filter. Nope.
I don't think this is spam.
We'll leave it in the inbox.
Spam filters don't work in a vacuum.
They need to be trained.
You are part of that training.
If you find spam in your inbox,
mark it as spam or junk, depending on the interface you happen to have.
That helps the spam filter learn what is and is not spam.
Similarly, if you occasionally scan what shows up in your spam folder and you find
legitimate email in there, don't just move it.
Take the time to mark it as not spam or not junk.
That too is training the spam filter.
It's training it that email like this, that's not spam to me.
Or if it's in your inbox and you're
marking it as spam, email like this, that's spam to me.
The more you do that in theory, the better the spam filter will get.
That's important.
However, not all spam filters are great.
Some don't learn very well.
Some take multiple hundreds or thousands of times being told that something is spam
before they'll start to recognize it as spam.
That sounds daunting, but especially if you're using an online
service, especially if you're using an email service where you're accessing
your email through a web interface, it's not just you.
All of the users of that service are marking spam and marking not spam.
All of that information then gets used to determine what is and is not spam.
If you mark something as spam,
but 1000 other people mark it as not spam, chances are it's not going to be spam.
It's going to keep showing up in your inbox.
That's kind of the way this system works.
On the other hand, if you mark something
as spam, and dozens of other people mark it as spam, eventually the service is
going to realize, hey, this is spam, I should throw it directly into the spam
folder for all the users who happen to get mail like this.
Now, spam filters vary in quality dramatically.
Like I said, spam filters online
typically are the better ones and the ones that you want to focus on.
So if you've got a Yahoo account,
if you got a Gmail account, if you've got an outlook.com account,
it's the online interface where you want to be marking things as spam and not spam,
because that's where the information gets filtered back all the way to the system.
If you use a desktop email program like Thunderbird, or Microsoft offices,
outlook program, or Em client, or any of a number of others,
when you mark something as spam, it's unclear how far that information goes.
At a minimum, it goes to the spam filter included with that program.
Rarely does it actually make it back
to the service, so the service doesn't learn anything.
But your spam filter in your email program may.
Regardless, when you get spam, mark it as spam.
When you see something that isn't spam in your spam folder, mark it as not spam.
That's how you deal with spam.
Now, quick sidebar, there's a service called what I call challenge response.
And that's one of those things where you can sign up to something and the first
time somebody sends you an email, they then have to respond to a challenge.
So if you send me a piece of email
for the first time, this service would send you a piece
of email and say, hey, you're trying to reach so and so.
He's protected by this service.
Please click this link,
fill out this capture, do whatever, confirm that you're a real person.
Once you do so, then your email address
gets allow listed and can now come through to me.
The problem from my perspective is twofold.
One is you're pushing the problem of spam onto your senders.
It's not their problem, it's yours.
You're telling them they have to jump through some hoops in order to mail you.
The other is that many of the people
trying to send you things aren't going to jump through those hoops.
You're going to miss things.
Specifically, you're going to miss things
from companies that have automated mailers.
There is no person,
but it is still legitimate email that needs to come to you.
They have no way to respond to the challenge response.
Yes, you can proactively add people to lists so that they always go through.
You're going to miss something, but you're going to miss a lot.
So I'm not a fan of challenge response systems at all.
The best way to deal with spam is to market as spam when it comes in and do
your best to prevent spam in the first place.
It's inevitable, but you can at least try
to stem the tide, try to not make yourself a big target.
And that means doing a couple of different things.
One, don't post your email address publicly.
It's one of the reasons that I don't allow email addresses to be posted in ask Leo
comments because it's a way for spammers to harvest email addresses.
It's public. You've made your email address public.
Yeah, spammers.
I have been known to go through all
of this public information online to harvest email addresses.
Don't respond to spam.
Don't act on spam.
Don't click view images on spam.
Don't do anything with spam other than mark it as spam or otherwise ignore it.
The problem is each one of those actions responding to it, clicking on it,
allowing images that tells the spammer they've got a legitimate email address,
that someone is actually reading their messages.
The result is they're going to send more spam.
Finally, don't give your email address to the wrong person.
I realize that's hard to know in advance.
Sometimes it's obvious.
But it is a very strong argument for using one off email addresses when you don't
necessarily know or trust whomever it is you're about to give an email address to.
That way, if that email address suddenly
becomes a target for tons and tons of spam, you can stop using it and you
still have your other email addresses ready to go.
So the bottom line here is that learn
to use your email interfaces spam Filter learn how to mark things as spam.
Learn how to mark things as not spam.
Don't bother blocking.
And if you find that your email service isn't getting better at dealing with spam,
find one that does right now, as I record this and for the past several
years, Gmail Spam Filter has been the best for me.
I run all of my email through Gmail
accounts specifically for the spam filtering abilities.
Hope that was helpful.
For updates, for comments, for related links and more, visit askleo.com/13576.
I'm Leo Notenboom.
And this is Askleo.com. Thanks for watching.