Spam, spam, spam. It’s fast and furious, appearing more quickly than you can nuke it. It’s a virtual game of Whack-a-Mole, and the game’s rigged, because you can’t win. Thank goodness for spam filters, because they’re the only bastion between us and the insanity that spam creates. The madness that resides within those messages is akin to a horror movie, where the crazy serial killer is a mishmash of pharmaceutical male enhancement, Nigerian princes with more money than brains, shipping notices for parcels that don’t exist, and meaningless gibberish that just wants you to click that link.
It’s maddening enough, but it’s a necessary evil of having email, and the benefits of having email are enormous. But have you ever wondered why you get spam? We all (hopefully) understand the reasons. If you use email, at some point, your email address is going to get out there. It may be purchased as part of a larger list; it might be freely-accessible if it’s part of a publicly-available email service; it might be stolen as part of a security breach in a company where your email address lives; or it might just get out there because you used it.
Jeff Fox at Huffington Post wrote an interesting article entitled How One Simple Mistake Turned Me Into a Spam Magnet. In the article, he talks about how he kept his email clean of spam for years by using some simple and common-sense rules:
- Don’t post your e-mail address publicly, especially not on a website
- Don’t open a spam and don’t respond to it
- An off-beat e-mail domain makes you less of a target (e.g. kool51.com)
- Using e-mail filters helps you get your important mail sooner
Seems straightforward enough; I do these things and more to protect myself, and have been doing so for years. For example, I have multiple email addresses, each one intended for a specific purpose. I never give my business email addresses for any purpose other than business, so only people directly involved with me in a business manner have access to those addresses. I use unique email addresses for things like online accounts with PayPal, Amazon, eBay, and so-on. I use a unique email address for personal causes, like signing petitions or posting comments online. I compartmentalize my emails even further, but I won’t get into the detail here. You get the point.
Now if that sounds like overkill, perhaps it is. But I have a rock-solid system that allows me to determine where my spam is coming from. If I sign up for a new service and see a dramatic increase in spam within hours, I know exactly where the breach in trust occurred. It happens all the time, and I know exactly what services are causing spam headaches.
For example, I routinely sign online petitions for causes that I believe in. I won’t mention the name of the petition site, but whenever I signed a petition, my spam spiked like a Mexican jumping bean within minutes of signing said petition. Now, I wasn’t paying attention, because some of the petition sites have a checkbox – checked on by default – that asks if you want to include your signature on the site’s page. Perhaps I had one glass of wine too many, but I didn’t see it or chose to ignore it, and voila! Spam flood. And that’s not even including the flood of spam messages from the petition site itself. Support one cause and you start getting messages from people you’ve never heard of, asking you to support another cause. It’s pretty alarming, actually, because being hounded by these people has the opposite effect (for me, anyway). I’m so peeved by the ‘Mormon knocking on my door’ effect that I want to actively not support their cause.
I even recently had to shutter one of my email accounts because it had become infested with so much spam that it became useless to me as a practical email address. It’s never a fun thing when you have to shut down an address and ensure that everyone you want to maintain has access to your new address. And it made me wonder: am I responsible for my own misery? I admit that I’d gotten sloppy with who got what email address, and it’s clear that even one misstep can have disastrous results, if you consider spam to be disastrous.
Jeff Fox recounts a similar story. His email got into the wild in a single tweet by one of his Twitter friends. That error turned into 8,000 spam messages. So what’s the moral of the story? We must be vigilant. The spam landscape is bad enough without making it easier for spammers.