Talk:Lecture 7

SPAM

TedZ: I am struck by the irony of the fact that the Pew Organization admits to using "telephone spam" to conduct their research into email spam. I wonder how many people used the defense mechanism that I use (don't answer the phone unless the person starts talking to the answering machine and I recognize the voice) for deflecting unwanted telephone calls?

I'm a long-time internet user (10 years or so I think), and I must have pretty strong defense mechanisms, because I average less than 1 spam email per month. I use a white list to filter most of my email, guard my email address, NEVER even click on anything that might be a spam, do not click random advertisements on web pages, never click on a link in an email (even if it looks legit, such as a note from my bank), use throw-away email addresses when necessary, etc. Given the fact that the people taking this class are probably fairly technologically savvy, I wonder what your experiences with spam are? Anyone overwhelmed by spam? What are your defense mechanisms?

JSpaith: I was inspired by my SPAM defense by another guy in my group, who does this with sapek.com. I own spaith.com, Spaith fortunately not being a common name and me being in time to get it. (The story my aunt tells me is that my great-great grandfather, Wilhelm Spaith, originally spelled it the more common Spaeth but changed it to Spaith on coming to the US from Germany. Spaeth.com was taken by the time I wanted to pull this trick, so I credit old Wilhelm with being a visionary and foreseeing the day this would matter. Just a little off topic I know.)

My anti-SPAM plan works as follows. Whenever I go to say buystuff.com, I give them the email address JohnBuystuff@spaith.com. So if they sell my email address to another company that spams me, I can (1) block JohnBuystuff@spaith.com and if I'm really irked I can (2) have all messages sent to JohnBuystuff@spaith.com forwarded back to the CEO of BuyStuff.com. This lets me be super-liberal with giving out my email address. Interestingly if I just block marketing@spaith.com and sales@spaith.com, I get very little spam. I use no other mechanism than that (i.e. white lists, software plugins, etc...), though maybe my mail host is being smart for me behind the scenes. Spaith.com has my email as johnWeb@spaith.com listed as my contact info in the event a bot ever picks it up and starts spamming me. And since I don't want a bot picking up my email from here, I leave it as an exercize to the reader to figure out my real email address.

This of course is good for the John Spaith's of the world (all one of us), but the poor John Smith's have to be more clever. My scheme falls to pieces for me too if my real email got onto some SPAM engine and we don't fix SPAM.

Avichal I have had my email since about 5 years, and although initially I may have done some dumb things (posting email address to a webchat etc.), but I would say I have generally protected my email address. I do get about 10-20 spam emails every day, although with the use of exclusive blocking (white list), I am able to deflect most of them. However the problem with tha is, I have to constantly scan the 'Junk' folder as well, and keep updating my 'allowed' list (new people, new email id for existing people etc.). But mostly I have learnt to live with it, and that's good I suppose, considering that spam is not going away anytime soon. Infact, considering that 'telephone spam' is still quite prevalent, probably spam will just be a part of IT world. I find email spam less intrusive than telephone spam (They call you right at dinner time). But I can imagine it to be a serious issue for people with children who are concerned about the emails they might receive.
The 'Do Not Email' registry, does not seem practical to me. I would have serious doubts that it can be implemented successfully.