There’s a lot of talk about RSS replacing email for various tasks such as online newsletters, so RSS is an email competitor, right? On the other hand, Aaron Schwartz posted today about an update to his rss2email script, which lets you subscribe to RSS feeds and have them delivered to you by email, and Lockergnome [...]

Stopping spam once the floodgates are open is much more difficult than keeping it from starting in the first place. How does one avoid getting their email address into the hands of spammers? Only show your email address to people who need it. Email is useless if no one knows your address, but it also [...]

Following up on yesterday’s post, there may be one more place to forward your spam. If you have a system where the sender uses a form on your website to send messages, you have the opportunity to record the IP address from which they accessed your site. Then, you can look up the ISP who [...]

We’ve covered a bit of what not to do when you get spam previously–don’t click the links. Today, let’s talk about what you should do when you receive spam.
Most of the time, just deleting it is probably the best thing to do–don’t let other people waste your time. But sometimes, you may want to strike [...]

With RSS and similar technologies in their current state, publishers run the risk of using significantly more bandwidth than with an email newsletter. Why? Let’s say you have a list with 20000 subscribers. If you email them all a 2K newsletter once a day, that’s 40MB/day of bandwidth. If you have an RSS feed with [...]

Many techniques are used for spam filtering: searching for user-specified words or phrases, statistical analysis of text, etc. One of the oldest involves creating a black list of sender email addresses from which all messages are blocked. Spammers have long since learned to work around blacklists by changing their addresses often and even using fake [...]

Unsolicited commercial email, a.k.a. spam–the fact that people are willing to cause others so much trouble to make a buck–is a sad sign of our society’s bustedness. As if we didn’t already have enough legitimate email in our in boxes, we have to deal with the fact that about half of everything we receive is [...]

Don’t click links in spam–EVER! Even if you’re interested in the product. Even if it looks like a legitimate company that just made a bad decision about how to attract new customers.
Even if you don’t enter any personal information on the spammer’s website, the link that you click to get there may include an ID [...]

Here’s a quick tip to elude a few of the techniques spammers use to figure out which of the email address on their lists are valid, and to perpetrate other mischief: turn off execution of scripts and showing of remotely loaded images (or all images) in your email client. Either can alert spammers of the [...]