Spam: refers to unsolicited
email, generally of the kind that (a) comes from
complete strangers and (b) requests you to do
something that will make them money
Me: David Fiedler,
writer/editor/web developer/daddy/musician/mad
scientist. On the net since 1983. Knows a few tricks.
Programs in assembly language and writes HTML using
text editors. Been there, done that, got lots of
T-shirts (mainly from computer companies). Aliases:
Dragon, KnightRighter. Analysis: mostly harmless, but
dangerous when riled.
And: keep going, I'm not done yet.
Die: you're toast.
Spam Me and Die.
I'm not kidding.
Like I don't have enough to do. Forget
my job responsibilities, the kids, whatever sort of
"free time" I manage to eke out of my
existence. At some point in the past before email and
computers, and probably when busy people all had
secretaries, I picked up the idea that a polite person
must answer all their mail. This perhaps made sense if
you got a few letters a week.
But now I get between 100 and 200
emails a day. Most of them are from perfect strangers.
Click here for sex. Click here to get rich. None of
these spammers are doing it "by accident"
because they didn't know that spamming is a Bad
Idea...not when they are based in the U.S. and their
email comes via an unsecured SMTP site in Spain.
(Some people who write to me are
genuinely real people looking for help. These are the
ones it is most difficult to ignore. But frankly, I
become overwhelmed, and while part of me really would
like to help you with your homework, redesign your
entire Web site, research your company proposal, and
rewrite your database application, that's not really my
job. I'm here to get articles written to help you do all
this yourself, and when I get enough demands on my time,
that important work doesn't get done and everyone
suffers.)
Now, I can't grow more hours in the
day, even for myself. But I can search out and destroy
spammers, and I thought it was about time to let you
know how to do this too, so that you can do it too. This
will reduce their population and hopefully make them
extinct.
Who says all species must survive?
I am proud to announce that I
personally bag anywhere between 10 and 20 spammers a
week. By "bag", I mean I get their accounts
pulled. Permanently. They're off the net, and out of
business. And although they may start up somewhere else,
virtually all Web hosting and Internet service providers
have anti-spam policies these days, so if they do it
again, I'll get them again.
My personal record is 15 minutes
between receiving a spam and hearing back from the
spammer's ISP that their account was canceled. One guy
got a fine of $200 (I really liked hearing about that
one :-). These creeps deserve no mercy. And if you think
they do, think about this: if you're reading email in an
HTML-aware editor, it's possible that you can be given a
system problem, if not a virus, by simply opening a
message.
The first thing you should do is visit
spamkiller.com
and buy a copy of Thor Ivar's wonderful program (two
guesses what it's called). Spamkiller comes with a
database of known spammers (which it updates
automatically for you) and filters them out so you never
even have to see their spam, but even better, it lets
you create your own filters and modify everything so it
does exactly what you want. It checks multiple email
accounts and can then launch your email program if you
have real email.
But the best part of Spamkiller (for
me, anyway) is the way it goes through message headers
and bodies. So when someone who's trying to advertise
their nastysite.web sends email through a throwaway AOL
account, Spamkiller lets you complain to the proper
authorities at nastysite.web with just one or two
clicks. Now, the spammer sitting at nastysite doesn't
care about your complaints, but using Whois
Ultra (or any other whois lookup program) will tell
you who their hosting provider is, and complaining to
their abuse account will generally get the desired
result.
Even more fun are the morons who join
affiliate programs and then send me spam... Spamkiller
will read the domain of the affiliate program right out
of their email and with just a few more clicks, they
lose all their not-hardly-earned money and account
forever!
Pretty dang good for $30 and you get
free program updates too.
-- D. Fiedler
David Fiedler is Editor-in-Chief of
www.WebDeveloper.com,
and his opinions are definitely his own.
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