Knock Out Spam With the One-Two Punch

Are you sick of spam relentlessly spewing into youremailbox? So was I, until I learned how to knock it out, orat least slow it down, with my one-two punch. Do both ofthese things, neither of which will cost you a penny, andenjoy a distinct decrease in the amount of garbage in yourinbox. Here we go: #1 Mail Washing First, hit the spam with Mailwasher, available free atwww.mailwasher.net. This easy to set up little program letsyou preview email before downloading it. You see all theusual details - sender, subject, size - but with one bigdifference: you can decide BEFORE downloading if you wantit. You get, I'm sure, many emails that you wouldn't havedownloaded if only you'd known what was in them. That'sjust one thing Mailwasher can do for you. Its real power isin its ability to 'bounce' unwanted messages (spam) rightback to the person who sent it, marked 'messageundeliverable.' To the spammer it looks as if your e-mail address is nolonger active, and hopefully, the next time they 'clean'their list, your email address will fall off. But even ifit doesn't, Mailwasher adds the spammer's address to ablacklist. The next time they spam you, it's already markedfor deletion. (You can always unmark it.) When you're finished 'washing' your mail of spam andunwanted downloads, click 'process mail' and whatevermessages are left will be downloaded as usual when you logon through your e- mail program, which you can do directlyfrom MailWasher. I have over 20 email addresses, so you can imagine theflood of spam that poured in my mailbox every day. Now Irun them all through Mailwasher first, and it has made ahuge difference. To further reduce spam, Mailwasher has another trick thatyour regular email program doesn't. It learns. There areall kinds of settings, filters, sorts and alerts. The moreyou use it, the more it learns what you do and don't wantto see. It does lots of stuff that I haven't even triedyet. But for what I need - quick and dirty spam elimination- it does great. Best of all, it's free to try. If you like it, the authorasks that you pay him whatever you think is fair. How muchyou pay him is up to you, but the funds go to futuredevelopment of the product. Considering how useful thisprogram is, I think that's a very worthy cause. #2: Email Encoding Once you've got Mailwasher going, you're on your way togetting off the spam lists. To stay off, don't skip thissecond step! One of the ways that spammers get your email address isthrough harvesting programs that crawl the net snatchingemail addresses off of websites, message boards,newsgroups. Anywhere they can find something that lookslike an email address, they grab it. And the way that theyknow it's an email address is by looking for 'mailto' orthe '@' symbol. There are programs available - also free - that will encodeyour email address for you. This converts your ASCII emailaddress into its equivalent decimal entity. For example,the letter "a" equates to: "a" (without the quotes), theletter "b" equates to: "b", and so forth. Here's an example of an email address: "johndoe@someserver.com" which appears as: johndoe@someserver.com To make the link clickable, you need to include the HREFtag, i.e. "nospam@myserver.com" which appears as: nospam@myserver.com Try it. Copy either of those expressions (WITHOUT thequotes), save it in an HTML file, and open it in yourbrowser. It looks and acts just like any other email link,but the spam bots only see numbers and characters. Here are a few free email encoders: (JavaScriptutility) (JavaScriptutility, doesn't include HREF tag) (emails the results toyou) Encoded e-mail addresses can be read and translated backinto the original ASCII text by almost any web browser, soyou can use encoding wherever you can use HTML. I'vereplaced regular email links with encoded links on all ofmy websites. Unfortunately not all forums will let you use HTML. Inthose cases, you'll have to rely on putting the NOSPAM inyour email address, or using only "throwaway" emailaddresses such as from Yahoo or hotmail when posting topublic places. Another trick: spell out your email address,i.e. my email address is "sharon at geolocal.com" or"sharon at geolocal dot com." Not as good as being encodedand clickable but better than nothing. Of course, spammers are a clever bunch. Whatever we come upwith, they'll find a way around. Pretty soon they'llprobably program their nasty spam bots to translate encodedemails for them. The only answer for that is to replace email links with anIMAGE of your email address. Only human eyes can see thatan image is an email address, so it can't be harvested.But, *don't* link the image to your email address unlessit's encoded - that would defeat the purpose, which is tomake your email address unreadable by the spam bots. The downside is that human eyes will have to manually typeyour address to send you an email. Unfortunately, thatincludes people you WANT to hear from. There's no wayaround that. Hopefully one day we won't need to go to suchlengths to avoid what has become the scourge of theinternet. So, to summarize: 1) use Mailwasher to delete and bounce spam, whichhopefully will get you dropped from spam lists, and 2) encode your email address on web pages and other placeswhere it can be harvested. Try the one-two punch and see ifit works for you. If nothing else, it will give you thesatisfaction of knowing spammers are getting uselessmessages in their mailboxes too.