My Penis Is Large Enough, Thanks

by Kisha Geijer

One thing that pretty much every internet user has in common, regardless of nationality, age, gender or interests is that they hate unsolicited email, commonly referred to as spam. You could set up a new account every so often to stay one step ahead of the spammers, but it's always a hassle to make sure all your mail gets to the new address. The bad news is that there is no ultimate solution to the spam problem. The good news is that with a little effort, you can get some relief from the flood of emails selling you prescription medication, colon care products, mortgage rate reductions and my personal favorite - spam blockers.

The first thing to understand is where all the spam comes from. The evil spammers harvest email addresses from all sorts of places. Most spam is typically sent to addresses that are posted on public websites. Does your homepage have a mail link? That's probably where a lot of your spam is coming from. There are special programs designed that run around the internet searching for email addresses, so the first line of defense is to eliminate posting your email address in a recognizable format. That doesn't have to mean that you can't receive email from your visitors, though. The trick is to write it so that humans can read it but not spam programs.

There are two main ways to achieve this, and they work equally well. The easiest is to write your address out so that a human could reconstruct it while a computer wouldn't recognize it as an address at all. For example, I could write kisha at mosaicminds dot net, and a real person would be able to put that together with the @ symbol in the right place. Current spam programs aren't smart enough to do that. That requires a little more effort on the part of the viewer, though, and it might be confusing for those who aren't technically savvy. The other solution is to use HTML character entities. These are similar to the secret codes you made up as a kid-just another way of writing than using the correct letters. When you use these in your HTML document, your browser displays the address completely correctly, but spammers still can't understand it. Using this method, I could write my address like this:

k i s h a @ m o s a i c m i n d s . n e t (with no spaces.)

It doesn't make much sense to the human eye-unless you're even geekier than yours truly - but computers understand this sort of nonsense and will display it correctly. There's a really nifty utility that will convert your email address to these entities, which will allow you to just copy and paste the result. (Email Address Encoder)

Unscrupulous companies can be the culprit for the spam you receive as well. Sometimes they sell information about their customers, so make sure you read their privacy policy before you decide to do business with them. Most real companies actually respect your email choices, so if you sign up with someone and request that they not send you mail, they probably won't. Read carefully, though, because the choices are sometimes tricky - they're not going to make it easy for you. Make sure you don't allow them to share information with a third party, because that's just asking for trouble.

There are other tactics to take into consideration. A lot of people have an email address specifically for use in places likely to send spam. Lately, disposable email addresses are becoming popular. You create a temporary address, and the email is forwarded to your real account. After a while, the address expires and the spammer can no longer reach you. This allows you to conduct your business or receive the information you wanted without a long-term commitment. For more information, check out Spam Gourmet, one popular service.

Furthermore, studies on spam - yes, there are people who actually study this sort of thing - show that after you make these changes, the amount of spam you receive does gradually decrease, so it seems that the spammers are harvesting fresh meat all the time and leaving the old addresses behind. That means that there's hope to clean up your account without the bother of creating a new one. It's important to remember that these are not foolproof methods.

Of course it would be better to never receive any spam at all, but if you're still being deluged by unsolicited emails, setting up filters in your email program might help you get rid of most of those pesky emails. Properly applied, these filters (also known as rules) can either delete your mail or redirect it to a separate folder that you can sort through now and then to see if mail from your mom was misclassified. The advantage of this is that theoretically, only your real email will appear in your inbox and you won't lose real mail in the piles of junk.

How does it work? Your email program looks at each message and checks it against a set of criteria that you set (for example, if the word "Viagra" appears in the subject of an email, it will never make it to my inbox - Viagra is a very common word used in spam and one that few real people ever use in the subject.) These filters can be tricky - if you set the rules up too strictly, you might lose mail from real people, so you might prefer that mail that looks like spam go to a folder. Setting up filters will depend on your email program. Some (like Eudora) will even do this automatically. There is also a growing market for separate programs to manage your spam, such as Norton Anti-Spam. Check the sidebar for resources on setting up spam filters or finding stand-alone programs.

Some junk mail will still get through. Hopefully, by following these tips, you'll get some blessed relief from the piles of spam arriving in your inbox every day.

This article and accompanying information is provided as a resource only. Mosaic Minds, its editors and staff cannot be held liable for any problems stemming from the use of any of the software, techniques or technologies mentioned.