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Anti-Spam:
E-mail has become the subject of much abuse, in the form of both
spamming and E-mail worm programs. Both of these flood the in-boxes of
E-mail users with junk E-mails, wasting their time and money, and
often carrying offensive, fraudulent, or damaging content. This
article describes the efforts being made to stop E-mail abuse and
ensure that E-mail continues to be usable in the face of these
threats.
Protection against spam
End users can protect themselves from the brunt of spam's impact in
numerous ways.
Spam filters
The continuing increase in spam has resulted in rapid growth in the
use of spam filter programs: software designed to examine incoming
email and separate spam emails from genuine email messages intended
for the user.
Unwanted e-mail can be filtered at the desktop, the network email
server/email gateway, the Internet Service Provider's email gateway,
or all three locations. While network managers and ISPs can choose
hardened email security appliances, services or software designed to
interdict both spam and viruses, desktop users are frequently limited
to a software-based solution.
A number of commercial spam filtering programs exist and are readily
available, but many freeware and shareware spam filters are also
available for easy downloading and installation. Spam filters are
currently included as standard features in nearly every available
email client, though the quality of these built-in filters can be low;
for some users, this may necessitate the use of a higher quality
filtering solution.
Preventing Address Harvesting
Preventing spammers from obtaining your email address doesn't really
solve the spam problem, any more than avoiding all but lowest crime
areas of a city solves crime. Many people cannot hide their email
addresses and most people want to meet new people via email. They just
don't want the flood of spam. It may, however, reduce the amount of
spam that you receive.
One way that spammers obtain email addresses to target is to trawl the
Web and Usenet for strings which look like addresses, using a spambot.
Contact forms and address munging are good ways to prevent email
addresses from appearing on these forums. If the spammers can't find
the address, the address won't get spam.
There are other ways that spammers can get addresses such as
"dictionary attacks" in which the spammer generates a number of
likely-to-exist addresses out of names and common words. For instance,
if there is someone with the address adam@example.com, where 'example.com'
is a popular ISP or mail provider, it is likely that he frequently
receives spam.
Address munging
Posting anonymously, or with an entirely faked name and address, is
one way to avoid this "address harvesting", but users should ensure
that the faked address is not valid. Users who want to receive
legitimate email regarding their posts or Web sites can alter their
addresses in some way that humans can figure out but spammers haven't
(yet). For instance, joe@example.net might post as joeNOS@PAM.example.net,
or display his email address as an image instead of text. This is
called address munging, from the jargon word "mung" meaning to break.
Contact Forms
Contact forms allow users to send email by filling out forms in a web
browser. The web server takes the form data and forwards it to an
email address. The user (and therefore the spam harvester) never sees
the email address. Contact forms have the drawback that they require a
website that supports server side scripts. They are also inconvenient
to the message sender as he is not able to use his preferred e-mail
client. Finally if the software used to run the contact forms is buggy
or badly designed they can become spam tools in their own right.
Disposable e-mail addresses
Many email users sometimes need to give an address to a site without
complete assurance that the site will not spam, or leak the address to
spammers. One way to mitigate the risk of spam from such sites is to
provide a disposable email address -- a temporary address which
forwards email to your real account, but which you can disable or
abandon whenever you see fit.
A number of services provide disposable address forwarding. Addresses
can be manually disabled, can expire after a given time interval, or
can expire after a certain number of messages have been forwarded.
Some of these services allow easier creation of disposable addresses
via various techniques.
Defeating Web bugs and JavaScript
Many modern mail programs incorporate Web browser functionality, such
as the display of HTML, URLs, and images. This can easily expose the
user to pornographic or otherwise offensive images in spam. In
addition, spam written in HTML can contain JavaScript programs to
direct the user's Web browser to an advertised page, or to make the
spam message difficult or impossible to close or delete. In some
cases, spam messages have contained attacks upon security
vulnerabilities in the HTML renderer, using these holes to install
spyware. (Some computer viruses are borne by the same mechanisms.)
Also, the HTML can be used to signal whether a spam message is
actually read and seen by a user.
