Ever get a 'broadcast message' from a friend or family member? You know, the email addressed to you and 300 other people. Have you ever looked at that list and thought "wow, I just got 300 people's addresses I don't know - wonder what I could do with that"? Now what if YOU in turn, hit reply to return the favor and added say 10 or 15 of your friends or family. And each person did the same. Have you ever thought that you email address is being given to hundreds maybe even thousands of people you don't know? Imagine all those people with viruses, that are now using YOUR email address to send viruses under. Its a fast growing epidemic - one that everyone needs to combat. Educate your friends and family about using BLIND CARBON COPY (aka BCC) instead of putting everyone in the TO field or using CARBON COPY (aka CC). Using TO or CC with multiple recipients is giving out email addresses to people that shouldn't have it.
How can you fight the epidemic? Simple - set up a filter in your email program to BOUNCE emails that have a comma in the TO or CC line! Yes, its really that simple! Anytime someone sends you a BCC message, only ONE address will appear as the recipient - you (not you and 300 of their friends). Therefore, you are safe 99% of the time to bounce back an email with a comma in the TO or CC line. The exception to this rule is if someone sends you a "last name first" style email address (i.e. "Monroe, Shane" <webmaster@hisdomain.com>) - this will trigger the filter, but its pretty rare. The solution to this is to create an address book that contains a list of people you want to be excluded from this rule, and check that list before executing your filter. Any good email program can do this.
If you really want to 'teach a man to fish' instead of just giving him one, have your filter not only bounce/ignore the email, but send the sender a little note explaining to him that you ignored his email - and why. Most people just don't realize what they are doing and are actually happy to be educated. Here is what my bounce message says:
It may sound a little harsh, but sometimes you have to be in order to get the message across. I've gotten ONE hate mail over this bounce system, and several that say "whoa, sorry - I didn't realize what I was doing".
Filters - But how can they really work for you?
People spend a LOT of time and money trying to STOP spam from getting to their computer. In reality, what we ALL really want is to NOT have our 'good mail' contaminated with unwanted or junk mail. While there are dozens of services out there that claim to stay on top of junk mail companies and 'pre-filter' your mail for you - it will cost you and you still can't be promised 100% cleanliness. I decided to take a different approach.
Instead of stopping it, I decided to make it no longer troublesome to me. If you can't stop it; find a way to ignore it. People don't tend to care if they get junk mail as long as their 'new mail' alert doesn't pop up, and its mostly segregated from the good mail.
Now the average person receives basically three types of email; junk/unwanted mail, desired mail from recognized sources, and desired mail from unrecognized sources. The trick here is to get both desired email types in front of you, and ignore/delete the junk. But how can we do this?
The first part of the solution will require a little work from you. If you are anal about keeping your address book up to date with your friends, family, etc. then you are one step ahead. You already have a great filtering system available to you. Those that do not have good address book skills, its time to start. Most email programs have a filter option for 'known' email senders. In other words, if you receive an email from someone in your address book, your email program is already savvy (or able to be), and all you need to do is write a filter that takes known sender's email and send them to a certain email folder. Chances are 99.9% that you WANT to see this email and you want to be alerted when it comes in. In many cases, that will cover 60-90% of 'desireable' emails that come in.
That leaves us with desired email from unknown senders and junk mail.
Unfortunately, without human intervention, its practically impossible to tell the difference. Now you CAN write filters to slap out some very obvious expressions that are common to almost every junk mail or virus. Other stuff, you'll just have to poke through - BUT - you don't need to have your email program screaming you got new mail when chances are likely its spam, and not legitimate email.
So how do we accomplish this? First, write an email filter that sends common phrased junk mail to the trash (or if you are concerned with accidental deletions - just mark the message as read - which should keep your new mail alert from triggering) automatically. Here are some of my favorite filtered expressions that have done good by me:
- TO BE REMOVED
- THIS IS NOT UNSOLICITED EMAIL
- I WOULD EXPECT YOU TO ENJOY IT.
- CLICK HERE TO ORDER
- HOMEOWNERS!
- VIAGRA (along with) NO PRESCRIPTION
- PENIS ENLARGEMENT
- TO UNSUBSCRIBE (unless you have real subscriptions - more later)
- EMAIL SENT IN ACCORDANCE WITH
- ... and there are dozens more, but you get the idea.
Now ... once you've been through the 'known' senders filter and the 'known' junk mail filter, what you have left has got about 50-50 chance of being a desired email from an unknown sender. We've managed to drastically reduce the amount of email you now need to poke through every day. That saves you time and effort.
The good news is; the system only gets better with age. Why is that? As you poke through those mystery emails each day, you can add unknown-yet-desired email senders to your address book (I have an extra address book just for casual contacts that I want to be alerted about when their email comes in, but I don't want to trudge through when I bring my regular address book up to send to more common contacts). This removes them from the 'chance' pool, which in turn gives you better odds of seeing only desired messages. You are also going add junk mail phrases to your known junk filter (right?) so that system will get better with age. The more time you spend being anal about your email, the better it will get.
There are some other tricks you can use filters for. Say you run a couple of websites, and you know that a lot of your unknown but desireable email comes as a result of them. Suppose your website deals with FERRETS and another one deals with the TV show THE SIMPSONS. Nothing is stopping you from creating a couple of extra email folders for each of these and having a filter look for FERRETS or SIMPSONS and sending those emails directly to those extra folders. This decreases the amount of 'unsorted-probably-spam' email you have to sift through. If you are on some legitimate subscriptions that use keywords that appear in your spam filter, write a filter that runs BEFORE the spam filter that takes the message sender (usually some sort of fixed, bot address from the subscription service) and send it to a dedicated folder.
A lot of this stuff seems like common sense - and lots of people do one or two of these things - but their real power is when you combine and nuture them. It sounds like a lot of work, but before you know it, the spam will start tapering off, and you are getting a higher quality of email-life because of it. Unfortunately if you're not already comfortable with your email's filtering system - you have a little more work to do that the rest of us. But in the end, its worth it!
Here is a quick list of my basic filters I use and the order I run them in ...
- CC NOT ALLOWED (bounce multiple TO/CC mails)
- INCREDIMAIL NOT ALLOWED (bounce mails sent with IncrediMail)
- FILTER KNOWN JUNK MAIL PHRASES (mark them as read or delete)
- MOVE KNOWN PHRASES TO DEDICATED FOLDERS (subscriptions, web site keywords, etc)
- ANY MESSAGE AT THIS POINT IS PROBABLY SPAM (mark it as read)
So, basically, any mail that is junk or LIKELY junk is at the VERY LEAST marked as read and my new mail alert doesn't go off. At my leisure I will go through the marked as read mail, make changes to my filters accordingly, and move on. How well does it work? I end up with maybe 5 total spams a day that I have to manually delete. My wife, who is NOT using this system, can get anywhere from 10-30 (or more) a day. The ones I DO get don't bother me (I'm not opening my email program based on the new mail alert screaming at me, only to find out that I can enlarge my penis in 21 days or less).
Its not perfect - but its a step in the right direction.
Why bounce IncrediMail sent emails?
With spam running rampant, the last thing the world needs is a bloated, fat, bandwidth sucking email package that caters to people who think that an email without rainbows, moonbeams, unicorns and animated graphics all over it just isn't complete. Do you enjoy getting emails that are 40k in size or MORE, because someone wrote "Hello" to you with IncrediMail? What if EVERYONE used this nasty bloatware? Imagine if EVERY email you receieved was 30x bigger! You think spam is a problem? I submit to you that anything sent with IncrediMail should be considered serious spam.
Right then, another filter is in order here. Here is my 'bounce filter' (look for IncrediMail in the headers to trigger the filter)...
YOUR EMAIL HAS BEEN IGNORED AND DELETED.
The message you sent to me was NOT receieved. It was, in fact,
delivered directly to my trashcan, and this message was sent as a
result. Read on to learn why.
The term "IncrediMail" was found in your email message header.
I do not, nor will I EVER accept any mail sent with this email
program. Should you wish to contact me, select a different email
program, send your email via webmail, or attempt to contact me some
other way.
You may think I'm rude or being unreasonable. But you need to
understand why I consider your email spam.
Why will I not accept Incredimail? Because along with spam,
Incredimail email is the most offensive thing I could possibly
receive. You're helping clog the internet just as bad as any spammer.
Most spams are 10-20x SMALLER than even your smallest message.
Incredimail used BLOATED, WORTHLESS graphics and templates to take a
simple, 1k email and bloat it to 40k or more. If everyone's email was
40x bigger than in should be, we'd all be in trouble. Why should I
use my time and bandwidth to download a 40k message so you can say
"Hello"? Imagine the people on dial up that require even MORE time to
receive your message. Finally, some people still pay on a PER MINUTE
basis to be on the internet. You are costing them money and/or time.
So, if you want to use that fruity, internet clogging email program,
you'll need to exclude me from your emailings. I'm doing MY part to
reduce the amount of WASTED bandwidth the world uses as a whole by
denying Incredimail messages. I recommend everyone I know to do the
same.
I would recommend an alternative program - as I am NOT the only one
that hates Incredimail and the people banning it are growing everyday.
I recommend:
The Bat!
PocoMail
PMMail 2000
A search on Google will find these programs. Or visit:
http://www.monroeworld.com/pcsoft/index.htm for more information.
If you feel the need to flame me over this, don't bother. That
message will be deleted as well.
Thank you.
--
Shane R. Monroe
Sure, you're bound to piss some people off ... but you simply have to understand that people are taken in by glitz and hardly ever stop to think about the person on the OTHER end of the internet. These CC and IncrediMail bounces are NECESSARY if we hope to have any chance of educating people to stop abusing us and our email.
If you received my bounce message and are looking for some way to flame me, don't bother. Your mail will fall on deaf ears (esp. if you're still using IncrediMail to write me :).
If you want good alternatives, go check out my RECOMMENDED SOFTWARE list to find an email program that doesn't piss people off :)
