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 Spam, Junk Mail, and Advertisments
Originally posted on October
18th, 2003
Spam!!! and what you can do about it
Believe it or not, I know people
who like junk mail... Honestly, I do. They get a kick out of
it. I don't suffer from their delierium myself, but I would bet
dollars to donuts that a good number people don't mind replaceing
their keyboard every 3 months because of a worn out delete key.
That said, let's see what I can
do to help you rid your mailbox of Spam.
There are a tons of options that
I'll get into later, but first I thought I would tell you how
I do it. I don't get hardly any unwanted email now at all.
Here's how:
If you've had an email account
for any amount of time, then chances are you've had to deal with
unwanted retarded email. Spam is to email what junkmail is to
your mailbox in front of your house.
These people are relentless.
The first rule of any received unwanted email is DO NOT REPLY
TO IT!!! This is just what they want. A confirmation that
you a real live human being reading that stupid message.
Almost all of these email's shuck
everything from free credit reports to get rich quick schemes
to enlarging bady parts offer a opt out link or web address
for you to conveniently have yourself removed from their mailing
list. DON'T DO IT!!! NEVER NEVER NEVER respond to one of these
automated removals. All this does is confirm to them that you
are a real user and your email address really works. This is
GOLD to these guys.
Defend and Fortify, then Attack!
Now that that's out of the way,
lets get to what you can do to combat it.
You probably already have an
email account from your internet provider. If you're not getting
any spam now or if the level of spam that you are getting is
comfortable then the best thing you can do is stop using it.
Only give out this email account to your close friends, family
and business associates. Call it your Private/Primary email account.
Don't give it out to any websites.
So how then do you subscribe
to all those cool emails, newsletters and notices? You start
a common email account or Junkmail/Secondary account. You'll
use this to register for all those free vacations, email subscriptions,
chat rooms, newsletter and the newsgroups. Before you start to
freak out, don't. There's no reason to. You can set up one of
these very easily with Yahoo.com
or Hotmail.com just to
name two. Yahoo is my favorite because Yahoo lets you pull in
or download your Yahoo email account into Outlook Express, Outlook
2000, Eudora or any other POP based email package. What's more,
you don't have to stop there. You can setup as many email accounts
as you wish this way. When the email account starts getting too
much spam just delete it or stop using it. I recommend deleting
it. Then, the ISP (the company who handled that spam message
in the first place) will have to handle the dropped mail account.
Hopefully they'll catch on to the spammers IP number and investigate
when it starts to get too much traffic.
Now, if you've got the guts...
read on...
Kick em when their up, Kick when their
down...
If you're like me, you like to
screw with these guys. I love giving it back to them. My method
of attack is this. I setup an email account on Hotmail.com then
I respond to these guys inquiring about the product or service.
I send a honest legitimate request for information... No sooner
than my keyboard keys get cold from typing the message, I'll
get a response from the ignat company that sent it. As soon as
I have a persons name, phone number (hopefully a 800 number)
and an email address I unleash a fury of suspecting attacks on
these guys. I've done this for hire on a clients request once
because the spammer was targeting his daughters email account
on AOL. I almost forgot about the 800 number. If you're lucky
enough to get a company with an 800 number that's gold. You did
know that they pay about 28 cents for every call over 3 seconds
didn't you? Just program your computer to redial a number using
the phone dialer program on Windows to redial the number over
and over. All you have to do is redial for a weekend, Saturday
or Sunday will do, and that cost em around $200 - $300 bucks.
Some 800 number companies cut off their number is the level gets
too high.
Keep in mind that I'm not recommending
that anyone break the law here, just get as much information
about them as you can as pass it along to the companies I've
suggested and report them.
Michael Chukov
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