December 7, 2022

Here are some suggestions on how to fight spam and protect yourself:

1. Do not open or reply to spam email. Never respond to spam. Do not buy from unsolicited emails or respond to the disclaimer telling you that you can “unsubscribe” or “remove” to get off the list. Do not click on the link or request the address to be removed. A spammer views this as verification of a good address, continues to send emails, and resells your email address. Even opening the spam mail can send a return receipt to the spammer in some instances. Be aware that viewing email in a preview pane of your email software opens it.
2. Know the policy of newsletters or emailing lists you sign up for. Reputable companies and newsletters tell you whether they sell or give away email addresses. Reputable companies comply with a customer’s request to have their email address removed from a mailing list, and they will truly remove your name upon your request.
3. Beware of entering your email address into a website form. Whenever purchasing or entering personal information online, make sure that the recipient is a reputable organization that will not use or resell your email address. Review privacy policies for individual sites. Many sites have a checkbox for “Send Me More Info” that is automatically checked; you must uncheck the box to keep off their mailing list.
4. Beware of free services and contests on the internet. Many free services, contests, and demonstration products are available on the internet. The price for these “free items” is your email address. Even sending a free electronic card to a family member may add your email address and the recipients email address to a spam list.
5. Use a disposable e-mail address. Create a second email address that you use on the internet and reserve your primary email address for valid interactions. Use the disposable address any time you are uncertain about passing out your email address. Then when the address is getting too much spam, delete it and get a new disposable email address. A disadvantage is you need to remember a new email address when ever you stop using the old one. You may lose some valid emails if you provide your disposable address to someone you wanted to stay in contact with.
6. Use the filters in your email program. Many email programs, such as Outlook Express, Outlook, and Netscape have filters you can set directing email messages. These filters will allow you to send selected email to a trash folder. This has three main drawbacks:
   1. You still must download the e-mail to your computer before the filters work.
   2. The e-mail messages are on your computer.
   3. You must maintain and update the list of addresses you want delivered to your trash folder.
7. Use your mail preferences. You can add or remove email addresses or domains to a Block or Allow list within Preferences Tab
   1. Select Preferences > Mail and scroll down to Spam Mail Options
   2. Type in an email address or domain and click "Add" to add to the list
   3. To remove an entry, select the domain or email and select "Remove"
8. Modify the email address on your website. If you have a website with a contact email address, there are programs that harvest that address from the HTML code. To help defeat this, either use a generic address like info@yoursite.com that can be easily changed, or modify your email links as shown below. A disadvantage is you may lose some email messages, users may not understand what you are trying to accomplish and not realize they need to delete the “nospam” from the e-mail address.

Modification Example
Address: webmaster@yoursite.com
Modify to: webmaster@nospam.yoursite.com or webmaster AT yoursite.com
a. If you participate in online chat, ensure you do not make your e-mail address visible to others. Any time your e-mail address is available for others to see, it can be obtained by some one you do not want to have it.
b. Clean up message headers before forwarding messages and ask friends to do the same. Almost everyone has received some form of chain letter, joke, or story, which has been forwarded to them by a friend. Viewing the email you see several pages of addresses listing the other people who saw it before them. When a spammer sees one of these messages, they can go through and harvest all of those addresses and then add them to their database. By cleaning out the old headers out of the message before forwarding can help slow the spread of addresses. This does not protect you directly, but it does help to protect your friends, and each person who takes the time to clean out those old headers helps to reduce the chance that spammers will get a hold of more address.
c. Use BCC when sending mail to multiple people, and encourage the people you correspond with to do the same. Every time email you send out an email, it contains your email address and the addresses that you enter into the TO: and CC: fields. BCC: is another field in most email programs, where you can enter email address without them being visible to the recipients. You can use it to send emails to multiple people with sharing the address of those individuals who receive the message. This too, is something that helps protect your friends more than you, but is still a good practice.

You can also fight back by forwarding anything objectionable to GCI, and then just delete the message. Forward the full email, copying all header information into the text of your email message, to abuse@gci.net. We can try to get the spammer’s ISP access disallowed. However, devious spammers can forge email addresses and mail servers of origin, and shift internet accounts constantly, so senders of particularly objectionable spam are hard to fight. 

No system can block 100% of all spam from reaching your system. However, these steps can help reduce the amount of spam you get.