sundance-communications.com/forum Forums General General Telephone & Systems Information Email procedures

I am posting this in the hope that word gets out. Since our forum open provides email and contact info for people on this board, using email properly is important. This last spring I had to change my email address due to the amount of SPAM I was getting. One of the ways spammers get emails addresses is to monitor email traffic. Any address in the from, to, and Carbon Copy lines can usually get read. Sometimes a virus or spam software will pickup addresses or received messages as well. What they normally can't see are addresses in the Blind Copy area. If you are sending messages one to one, this is really irrelevant, since they look for high volume messages or multiple addresses.

My point is this. If you want to send a broadcast email to a bunch of people, even if it is a good joke or something, the proper way to do it is to send the message to yourself and Blind Copy everyone else. You should not forward messages either. If there is content worth sending, copy and paste it to a new message and blind copy any multiple receipients.

Using these procedures will help cut down on unwanted SPAM and save everyone the hassle of having to change email addresses. I for one, am very concerned about having the SPAM bug get ahold of my address again.

I heard that! I have had to change my e-mail twice. I have never or will never send to a group of people. one-on-one is all I do. I'm sure that the site gets looked at quite often, This may be a job for our resident computer guru AvayaNovice to maybe suggest something that may help.
What do you think AvayaNovice, any ideas.

BCC, or blind carbon copy, is VERY appropriate for "group" emails.

The addresses only go as far as your SMTP server (simple mail transfer protocol) from there, your SMTP sever distributes the email to the appropriate recievers, but unlike a carbon copy -- each reciever cannot see the other email addresses that the message was sent to.

BCC is simple to use, you just need to tell your mail client to put a BCC line in each outgoing message, which can usually be done in the sending options of most Microsoft based email programs (you can specify other fields to show up as well).

As far as SPAM is concerned...

A lot of places that SPAM bots pick up email addresses from are boards like these. They browse through the pages and automatically investigate each link. So... if they make it into my profile from this board, they'll see that my email adress is nick(AT)nickhoover.com. I put in AT because I don't want a bot to pick up my address, they look for patterns like [email protected].

So one way to prevent that is to modify the UBB's code, which is fairly easy to do... so that email addresses show up like: NOSPAM!nickATnickhooverDOTcom rather than their actual format, doing that will prevent a bot from picking up the email address, and still let the end user realize, oh... I need to change this address to the right format.

While bots do pick up email addresses from messages, they usually use those addresses to distribute themselves (we're talking about viruses actually). So let's say DTMF has a virus, the virus scans all of his email and sends itself to everyone he has ever contacted. Had he receieved a message via BCC, the virus would be effectively unable to send itself to everyone else included on that message. So that's one small piece of the pie.

One of the most effective ways to eliminate spam problems... is a few bits of common sense (well, not so common to most...)

What I do is this:

I have had the same email address for years... and just like my Dad's cell phone number: 246-1234 -- I'm not changing my email address because it's too recognizable, and I'd lose a lot of contacts that way.

So...

Do this in your email client:

If you can, USE THE IMAP PROTOCOL. IMAP doesn't require you to download a message until you want to view it. All it does is download an index of all of your email (it also stores your email on the server, not on your computer) you can then choose to delete messages before you even get them, which saves you tons of time because you're not downloading millions of attachments and what not. Turn ON the TO: field in your email box. That'll allow you to see what e-mail address the sender used to send the email to you. A lot of times, SPAM emails will have an incorrect TO: address, relating to the e-mail... so if it's some tool advertisement email, it might say TO: BlackAndDeckerLover or something lame like that, but that's your first clue that it's spam. So rather than reading it... just delete it. When I get my email, I get about 100-150 spam messages a day, and maybe 4-5 legit emails per day... I can quickly delete all of the SPAM ones by looking at those clues (there are some more) before I even download the message... that lets me get rid of all of the trash.

Some more clues:

E-mail size. If the email is huge, or has an attachment, and you don't know who it's from -- DELETE IT! It isn't worth the risk.

Time/Date. A lot of SPAM will have an invalid date, like 1979 or it'll be sent at 4:00 in the morning. There's a good clue that it's a hoax.

So if you pay attention to those little clues, and get your e-mail setup so that it only downloads headers... you'll be quickly saved of the burden. As much as I like SPAM filters, they don't work very well yet. My eyes do.

But back on track...

BCC is definetely a good thing. When I get my route for the next day, my boss sends me a big index of all of the other guys that are working and where they're at. He sends that out to 25 guys, and uses BCC. All I see is that it's from him, I can't see anything else as far as who he sent it to. Very smart, also keeps everyone else in the recieving end private.

If you sign up on a lot of boards, or sign up on a website so that you can get full access... go ahead and get an email address through hotmail or something. You can use that when you signup, that way most of the junk mail goes to it rather than to your real address. That'll help you out too.

I don't know... there are lots of tactics, SPAM hardly bothers me because I'm so used to it, and I've got a fairly effective method of getting rid of it.

Good stuff. I'd say the biggest one is to have a "Junk" email addr to sign up on boards or sign up for anything else...
By just doing that, I have limited my junk mail to my business acct to about 2 or 3 per year. The filters that are out there can help, but spam blockers/filters are not reliable, especially out of the box.