Helpful tips to fry spam

By Rory Sa

As anyone with an e-mail address is aware, spam is an unpleasant part of life.

Behind the scenes at Internet service providers, including Fresno State’s CVIP and help desk, technicians use every trick they know of to help users limit the flood of unwanted advertisements to a bare minimum.

Kelly O’Boylan is an analyst for the help desk at Fresno State’s Information Technology Services. The help desk struggles against the seemingly endless flood of junk e-mail while keeping the e-mail servers functional.

“ The only thing spam is good for is filling up my trash box.” O’Boylan said.

The help desk has some tips for e-mail users to protect themselves from inboxes full of spam:

• Some Webpages ask visitors to enter their e-mail address into a form. If you don’t have to give your e-mail, then don’t.

“ Unless you have to get information back from the company you want to get mail from,” O’Boylan said, “don’t put your real email address.”

• “Never ever, ever respond or click a link in a piece of junk mail ever,” O’Boylan said.

Spammers are people who, well, send spam. They send e-mails to a wide variety of addresses without knowing if any of them are real e-mail addresses or not. By responding to the spammer, the spammer learns a particular e-mail address is real and there is someone who checks it regularly.

This also includes any links which say “Click here to unsubscribe,” for the same reason; “It basically tells the sender ‘oh, we’ve got a live one here, someone on the other end is trying to get off,” O’Boylan said.

“ I would estimate probably a good percentage of spam is designed… for no other reason than to generate active e-mail accounts from having people click on ‘remove me,’” he said.

“It just makes sense, some of this stuff can’t be real,” he said.

• If you forward e-mails to friends, O’Boylan recommends senders delete any e-mail addresses in the message itself.

• If you’re sending an e-mail to several people, put the receiver’s addresses in the “blind carbon copy” field.

“ The people who are getting the message will only see their address, so if they forward it on, it’s only their address that’s being exposed,” O’Boylan said.

• If you have an e-mail filter, use it. CVIP and Fresno State’s e-mail services use SpamAssassin, an open-source mail filter that helps filter out incoming spam. CVIP and the university have used SpamAssassin since last summer.

Like any filtering system, SpamAssassin’s effectiveness varies for each user. While it caught a lot of spam for O’Boylan, on its highest settings it also blocked some pieces of legitimate e-mail. “When I turned it on at the most sensitive level it easily caught 200 to 300 messages a day,” he said.

Because some help desk e-mails are from their web page, Spam Assassin mistook them for spam.

“ Other offices probably won’t have such a problem since the mail they get is mostly from individuals, which often don’t get caught as spam,” he said.

• If you have your e-mail address displayed on a web page or a discussion board, O’Boylan recommends you put spaces in between your user name and, the at symbol (@) and the domain name, for example ‘collegian @ csufresno.edu.’

This prevents programs that harvest e-mail addresses from Web pages from gaining a new piece of spam-bait.

• “And of course, don’t buy the stuff you see advertised in junk mail,” he said.