SPAM is a term for the innapropriate use of private e-mail
resources, and/or undesired direct e-mail, Usenet mail posts, and mail list interference,
from people or organizations peddling various goods and services or attempting to force
their opinions or principles on you.
SPAM costs you and your service providers time and money
and there's no reason to tolerate it any more than you tolerate junk postal mail filling
your mailbox or phone calls from insurance peddlers at 8am on a Saturday.
SPAM in this context is not a reference to, nor
does it have anything at all to do with, that wonderful canned meat product from
Hormel Corporation or its trademarks or copyrights.
YOU CAN FIGHT SPAM!!!
Join the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail,
at
- http://www.cauce.org.
SPAMmers and their suppliers of e-mail lists get your e-mail
addresses only a few ways. The most popular methods are via "robots" or
"spiders". These are relatively simple programs which dig through the
public Internet web sites and Usenet newsgroup postings looking for anything that
resembles an e-mail address, adding those addresses to a master e-mail list as they plod
along. We call these programs "harvesters".
Some of the ways to fight SPAM are: (1) Be careful of what
information you provide when you fill out forms on-line. Be mindful of where that
information may go. (2) Don't put your real e-mail return address into Usenet posts.
Corrupt the address in some way and warn readers about the return address
corruption in your message footer or tagline. (3) If you have a web site or even
just a simple web page somewhere, do not put any links to your e-mail address on that page
or site. Corrupt it in some way if you must have it there, and/or use a CGI script
to shield the actual e-mail address from browsers, spiders, and robots.
You can also fight SPAM by giving the e-mail harvesters something to
keep them busy. If a SPAMmer or the service who hosts them ends up spending all
their time handling bounced messages from non-existant addresses and administrative alert
messages and the resulting full mailboxes, it won't be worth it for the SPAMmer to do his
business and it won't be worth it for the service provider to host that business.
For the purpose of clogging up the harvesters, I've written a script
in VBScript called TDLYWNX.ASP. This script randomly generates
thousands of different e-mail addresses every time it is read, including a few special
addresses now and then to keep SPAMmers and their administrators busy.
If your web site runs on a VBScript (ASP) -enabled web server such
as Microsoft Internet Information Server, download the following source code:
- http://rectaltronics.com/vc.asp?source=tdlywnx.asp.
Please feel free to download and install this ASP script and tell
all your friends and ISP's to do likewise. A couple of examples
of what it can do are:
- http://rectaltronics.com/tdlywnx.asp,
- http://rectaltronics.com/tdlywnx.asp?chaff=1,
and
- http://rectaltronics.com/tdlywnx.asp?frommode=1.
When you put this script on your web site you should change the script name,
to keep spammers on their toes. Change it routinely. A future version will be
self-mutating.
The idea for tdlywnx.asp was shamelessly liberated
from John Harvey's Anti-Spam Tools, which are fine if your web site can
host Perl/CGI scripts. Check it out at
- http://www.tdl.com/~thawley/spam.html.
Other excellent spam harvester -clogging tools can be found at...
