Your humble correspondent claims a certain existential expertise with junk e-mail because he has brought down on his own head the worst that comes from the arrogant, slack-jawed spammers, the socially challenged worm writers and the certifiably obsessed political and religious nuts.
So here is my solution: Disguise, designate and delete.
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I know the value of disguise because I do the opposite by advertising my e-mail addresses on public Web sites and in a fairly large number of newspapers around the country.
Worse still, in terms of becoming a spam magnet, I urge people to send me e-mails. This makes me naked, if you can bear the image, to my enemies who are your enemies as well.
I’m naked because every e-mail I generate flies out into the Internet. There, nasty spammer-backed programs called packet sniffers monitor the transmission lines looking for the distinctive addresses that include a name followed by the @ sign, followed by a few letters (tribune) followed by a dot and com.
Spammers sniff out your name from the very spam their co-conspirators send to victims.
So, my fellow spam sponges, get a disguise. Get superstingy and give your primary e-mail address only to friends, family and clients or customers.
Otherwise get yourself a dummy account for public use. Consider getting a free account from Hotmail, Lycos and such. You can find a list of free e-mail providers at EmailAddresses.com. It’s a great idea to use more numbers than letters with dummy accounts to confuse sniffers.
Don’t use birthdays or any personally relevant figures, but string some numbers and letters together helter-skelter and then write down that address. For example, [email protected]. You don’t care if it gets stolen, so jot it down.
Use this address whenever possible. Use it in chat rooms, while requesting information on Web sites, while shopping on eBay and even while registering for sites that require logons.
Which brings up the second D, designate.
For the most part, you know whose e-mails you want to read on your main account. If you don’t recognize the sender, resist doubts about whether there will be something wonderful from someone you don’t know in the stack of messages that you must sift to find the people you know. It’s been likened to sorting through a can of coffee grounds for sesame seeds.
To designate who gets to send you messages, either use the superb free e-mail software called Outlook Express or buy a commercial product like Microsoft Outlook or Qualcomm Eudora that permits users to assign rules to messages.
In Outlook Express, for example, click on Tools at the top of the screen and then pick Message Rule. This calls up a wizard to help you set your account so that only messages from people in your address book are sent to a special folder. Or you can write a separate rule for individual folks you like. From then on you will have a spam-free folder to see your preferred mail.
Rules can be fairly complex and will let you send notes from targeted people directly into the trash bin. It also permits drafting rules about messages with specific words in the subject line, with specific words in the body, if a message contains an attachment and many other identifiers.
A little-known and extremely handy tool lies in the ability to sort all of the messages in any mailbox by the categories listed at the top of the list. In Outlook Express these include Attachment, From, Subject, Received and Size.
By clicking on any category you can sort the mail by that element. You can click on From and get a clustered list of all of the messages from any sender. A click on Size clusters messages with large attachments, such as files you are expecting from work.
During virus attacks, sorting by the Attachment heading usually will segregate all potentially threatening messages. You often can spot virus or worm packages because their payloads make them all the same size.
The recent MyDoom worm was 22 kilobytes, making it easy to find and delete with a simple sort.
Which brings us to the final D, delete.
Bulk deleting of e-mail messages is far easier than killing them one by one, and it can be done with a two-key shortcut. For example, when your e-mail has a long string of obvious junk, just click on the top item and then scroll down to the bottom one and hold down the shift key while clicking there. This will paint all messages. A simple tap of the delete key removes the whole mess.
You also can hold down Control and click to highlight messages that aren’t in a row for bulk deleting.
Be aggressive as a ferret in a foxhole with that delete key. Work your mail by bulk highlighting as you scan to save time, repeatedly hitting the delete key.
If a sender or subject line looks suspicious, kill it.
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If it seems mysterious, kill it.
Intriguing? Kill it.
Inviting? Kill it.
To paraphrase the old combat dictum: Kill them all and let the government sort it out. This is, after all, war.