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Guru Tip of the week
A SPAM story

I did an experiment in college, which I continue today. Basiclly I created
an email account, then randomly used it for everything I subscribed to. I
added this email address to anything that asked for one, I essentially made it a magnet for spam. I would then open the email account once a month or even as long as six months, and observe what type of spam I got, and how much.

The result of my study was as follows:
* I recieved dozens of variants of the 'nigerian scam' which I could not
isolate and block.

* I recieved hundereds of viagra ads, loan offers and other common spam
marketing scams. I could not specify exactly where I signed up to start
getting them. They only started when I subscribed to public online use
groups.

* I recieved weekly newsletters from (large corprate) companies and groups I
subscribed to, however no spam linked to any of them.

* I recieved hunderds (yes hundreds) of ads for music, movies, games,
netflicks, etc. which I linked to registering to a common media player
website. I seemed to get 4-5 per day of these.

* I recieved 1-2 unsolicited spam messeges a week with viruses in them, or
linked to them. These were the only viruses I recieved in the entire study,
so it goes to show, you are more likely to recieve viruses from family and
friends then random people.

* I recieved in total 10 ads involving porn. That shows if you have porn
spam, it's more likely that a porn site has your email address somehow then
a random occurance.

* Not considered porn, but I would recieve 2-3 solicitations a week.

* On occasion, I would recieve updates for the sites I registered with.

* I would recieve about 5 'zombie' messeges a week. (Messages from hijacked
spam computers)

Periodiclly, I would go into the account, and clean up the spam. I would
sort the messages by company or product, and use my own advice to remove
them. I will open each message and unsubscribe to it. I would add messeges
to the spam filter, and even block certain addresses.
I discovered that when I did these fixes, I would dramaticlly get less
messages. My inbox would go from 25 messeges a day to 2. The fix worked as
long as I continues it. If I didn't clean the inbox after a few months, the
old addresses would start sending again. Or I would find the same messeges
on new accounts.

I also noticed that I could learn what kind of spam I can expect to recieve
if I read the privacy policy of sites I registered with.

There were emails that didn't have an unsubscribe button, nor did they come
from a single address, these came from so called spam-bots or zombies, and
there is little I could do to stop them, other than delete them as they came
in.

Finally, When I did a spyware scan, oddly enough, it reduced my spam intake
as well. Even though I use internet email. I can only assume this is due to
my computer sending out the IP address or email address to someone.

I recieved perhaps 60,000 spam messages total.

Happy Computing

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