Can You Stop Spam Email?

August, 2003

What Is "Spam Email"
Why Do I Get Spam?
Can I Get Off Spam Mailing Lists?
How Do I Get Rid Of Spam?
How Do I Shield My Children From Spam
Who Are The People Behind Spam?
What Is The Government Doing About This Problem?

Your entire email "Inbox" is full of new messages, none of which are from your friends. When you click on them you find that the subject lines are often misleading, and you find advertisements or misleading information to get you to click links to websites. Worse, sometimes you find requests for credit card information or eBay passwords which look genuine, but are in fact efforts to steal your personal financial information. What can you do?

What Is Spam Email

Spam email is unsolicited email, usually with a commercial focus. Other names for Spam include "Unsolicited Commercial Email" (UCE) or perhaps more accurately, "Unsolicited Bulk Email" (UBE). Spammers will send thousands, and in some cases millions, of emails to try to lure people into buying their products, clicking on "affiliate links" or, worst of all, to try to steal confidential personal and financial information from unwitting recipients.

Please note that a key aspect of "spam" is that it is unsolicited. Sometimes people forget that they have signed up for information from particular merchants, or joined particular mailing lists, and confuse the emails they receive with "spam". If you asked for it, it isn't spam.

Why Do I Get Spam?

Most people who have an email address for any significant amount of time receive "spam email", and the longer you maintain a particular email address the more spam you are likely to receive. Spammers create lists of email addresses by collecting them from websites, buying them from other businesses, and even by guessing possible names on popular email hosts such as Yahoo! mail and Hotmail. It is possible to buy large email lists for relatively small amounts of money. Once you start receiving spam from a particular email address, it becomes effectively impossible to remove your name from the lists.

Can I Get Off Spam Mailing Lists?

There are two types of commercial email that you will receive: commercial email from legitimate businesses, and commercial email from true spammers. Occasionally a legitimate business will be tricked into purchasing an email list from an unscrupulous person, and may send you an advertisement that you do not want. However, every responsible business that sends bulk email also makes it easy to unsubscribe, usually through a link contained within the email.

Spammers often include a fake "unsubscribe" link in their email, but they typically use that link to verify that your email account works as opposed to actually removing you from the account. Unless you are absolutely sure that the email is from a legitimate business, or is for emails or a newsletter to which you subscribed, you should not use the unsubscribe feature.

Unfortunately, there tend to be a lot more illegitimate spammers than legitimate, responsible bulk emailers. This means that even if you unsubscribe from all of the commercial email you at one time invited, you are likely to continue to receive increasing quantities of spam.

With spam, as the saying goes, the best offense is a good defense. Be vigilant about your email address, avoid giving it to people or businesses you don't know, and don't let anybody post it on a website. Some people create "throw away" email accounts on free email services such as Yahoo! mail or Hotmail, so that they have an address they can give out freely without worrying about getting spam in their "real" email account. Once the "throw away" account starts to receive spam, they switch to a new "throw-away" account. Some people even use different email addresses for every transaction they make online, save for communication with family and friends, so they can figure out exactly who is responsible when they start to receive spam.

How Do I Get Rid Of Spam?

There are a growing number of technological approaches to dealing with spam. Filters may be "server side", screening for bulk email before it gets into your "Inbox", or "client side", checking every email in your "Inbox" to see if it is spam. The leading method of reducing spam is the use of an "email filter". Most webmail services now offer some level of email filtering to all of their clients, sometimes with better filtering offered to paid subscribers.

Unfortunately, the spammers invest a great deal of money and effort in defeating spam filters. Any given spam filter you use is likely to accidentally label some genuine emails as "spam", while missing some (or perhaps most) actual bulk email. While the technology behind filtering is improving, it is a constant battle to keep up with the "bad guys".

It used to be that you could report spam to the webhost where the spam originated, sometimes resulting in the spammer's site being shut down. Unfortunately, spammers now typically fake the information in the email header which might otherwise pinpoint their identity, and usually operate from servers which don't entertain complaints from recipients of spam.

How Do I Shield My Children From Spam?

If your children have email accounts, it is likely that they too will become the targets of spam. Spammers are often trying to sell products which are completely inappropriate for children, and spam emails often include very graphic pictures from adult websites. There are some software companies which produce filters to keep inappropriate Internet content from children, and if used they may offer some automatic filtering of such content from your children's email (particularly if it is web-based mail).

The best approach to keeping this garbage out of your children's email account is to set up their email so that they can only receive mail from known individuals. That is, you can set up their email on a service which allows you to set up a list of preferred email addresses, while blocking all email from any other address. That way, once approved, your children's friends and family can send them email, but spammers cannot.

Who Are The People Behind Spam?

A very large amount of spam email is sent by a small number of companies, which send hundreds of millions of unsolicited commercial emails to people around the world. Some of these companies are set up in nations which do not actively regulate or enforce their laws relating to this type of activity, meaning that it is very difficult to shut them down. Few of these companies respect the laws regulating commercial email.

What Is The Government Doing About This Problem?

The United States Government recently passed the so-called "CAN-SPAM" Act, which preempted state laws which regulated spamming, and created a new national law. Unfortunately, this law has yet to have any apparent impact on spamming activity, and some people have reported a significant increase in spamming since the law was passed. Critics of the law believe that it also interferes unduly with state efforts to limit spamming.

The government promises that it is preparing to prosecute a significant number of spammers under this law. However, the volume of spam email has increased significantly since the law went into effect.

Copyright © 2003-2006 Aaron Larson. All rights reserved. No portion of this article may be reproduced without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except as follows: You may link this article to your website, either directly or through an ExpertLaw Library index page, provided your link does not depict this article, its author, or expertlaw.com in a negative manner.