Spam Control

Like everybody else, I get deluged with unwanted email. Where does all of this stuff come from? The numbers of people trying to make a few dollars through email solicitations is growing. On any given day I receive the same solicitation from many different people, which tells me that the spammer’s mail lists are being distributed to a lot of different people.

Email addresses are harvested through a variety of techniques, and one contributor to those lists is our email client program – Outlook, Thunderbird, etc, and etc. It would be a simple matter for the mail client programs to not send the attending mail addresses that are present when you receive an email from someone. But they don’t. Whenever a person sends you an email, unless that sender used the BCC option, his whole list of recipients is exposed. When the email gets forwarded by you to your mailing list, you are automatically forwarding the addresses from your email list and the person who sent the email to you.

Those email addresses that accumulate on all of those forwarded jokes, and interesting tidbits that we all forward to friends on our mailing list eventually get harvested by any party wanting to create or expand a mailing list.

It would be easy to blame the person who forwards an email for the problem, but the real culprit is your email program for allowing those email lists to be included on any document that you forward.

Anti-spam programs are as much a problem as the spammers. Controlling spam is a business. But the anti-spam business can also act like a censor. How, you ask? Spam filters work using a variety of techniques. Here are but a few:

• Reject mail using keywords.

• Reject mail with links to other web pages.

• Reject mail that has links to web pages on their blacklist.

When the people who control these anti-spam programs have an agenda, they can act as a censor or gateway to what you receive in your inbox. For instance, if the email that was sent to you references a known anti-Obama website, the anti-spam program can reject the email because the referenced site is on their “blacklist”. Or if it contains words in the email that are on the spam list, then the email is rejected.

Ever wonder why some advertisements seem to always get into your inbox regardless of the spam filter? These unwanted ads force you to deal with them. Remember, those anti-spam people are in the business to make money and for a price, they will not classify their customers as spam.

Take control of your inbox! Reject the anti-spam censors and insist on spam filters that let you be the arbiter of what gets into your inbox. I have never understood why any person willingly gives control over his/her life to someone else. The anti-spam programmers know that the majority of people do not rummage through their junk mail box to see if there is anything that they might like to read, so when the anti-spam program puts an email into you junk-box, you have been effectively censored.

Voice your concerns over this form of censorship to your representatives. No, I am not advocating allowing all spam into your inbox, but our email programs can do a lot better than they do.

When your prospective email contains a link to a blacklisted website, the mail servers may just reject the email and you never even get to see it in your junk box. Anti-spam companies and the popular mail servers do not share their list of blacklisted websites with you. Wouldn’t you like to at least know from whom your mail is being rejected? Wouldn’t you like to have the opportunity to decide for yourself if a particular website should be rejected?

I would be ecstatic if my mail server would allow me to decide what gets into my inbox. I would be ecstatic if my email client program would list all mail sent by my email program. I am especially interested in that email sent automatically without the keyboard being used. I would be ecstatic if the email “forwarding” instruction would delete the email addresses from the original sender and not let them propagate with each time the email is forwarded. The current crop of email programs fail miserably at controlling spam. There are some simple solutions if there was a will. Make no mistake, the anti-spam industry is beginning to look like ‘Big Brother’ and is becoming as much a problem for the unsuspecting users as the spam that they are supposed to curtail.

Given the above, I fully understand the problem with receiving unsolicited mail. I hate it as bad as the next person. In full disclosure though, I send to a limited number of people a weekly announcement of articles that I write. The largest segment of readers of my stuff comes through search engines – not email. Sure I would like to expand my reader list, but when users receive emails from people that they do not know, it doesn’t help readership expansion, it only serves to aggravate a potential reader.

I even thought about buying a mail list from one of those in the business to collect email addresses, but the reality of junk email prevents me from taking that approach. I do not want to be part of the problem. However, to my readers, if you find the articles to be worth reading, please pass the webpage address to others who you believe might want to read the article.

Cheers,

-Robert-

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