Internet Tips: For Best Results, Can the Spam Yourself

It's time to fight back (nicely) against spammers. Consider this your introductory lesson in digital assertiveness.

I usually ignore junk e-mail. I get spammed about a half-dozen times a day, and it seems easiest simply to delete the unsolicited e-mail and be done with it. But over the course of a year, I spend hours downloading, reading, and deleting junk e-mail, and I want the onslaught to stop. The filters in e-mail programs and third-party utilities try to foil junk mail by looking for any spamlike message content. In my experience, these tools aren't worth the time and effort they require. Anyone who's ever tried to use Micro-soft Outlook's junk e-mail filter knows what I'm talking about. It uses a static list of suspect keywords (I can't add to the list), so the filter misses about half the obvious spam that bombards my in-box. Worse, it misidentifies many legitimate messages as junk mail. I'm better off simply deleting the spam manually.

To stamp out spam for good, you have to go to its source. All e-mail messages start from a mail server, and most spam originates either from a server whose administrators knowingly allow spammers to disseminate their garbage, or from a server that is not properly secured, allowing spammers to use it as a relay. You can help stop spam by adding spam-loving ISPs to the "black hole" lists described here, and by encouraging hapless network administrators to close any existing security holes in their mail servers.

The nonprofit Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS) maintains several lists of spam source. MAPS's Realtime Blackhole List (RBL) identifies known junk e-mail servers, so ISPs can block traffic from those servers and filter spam before it arrives at their customers' e-mail in-boxes. Thousands of ISPs use the RBL database, and it's also incorporated into a number of secure mail-server applications. The MAPS Relay Spam Stopper (RSS) database lists unsecured servers. ISPs can also consult the database of the nonprofit Open Relay Behaviour-modification System (ORBS) to reduce the amount of spam their customers receive. If you're flooded with junk e-mail, ask your Internet service provider to consider using one of these services. They can't stop all spam from getting through, but they will reduce the volume noticeably.