- - I turn on the 'To' field in my e-mail program so that I can see who the e-mail is being sent to. I won't read or even bother looking at the subject of any e-mail which:
- does not have a completed 'to' field
- is apparently sent from my e-mail address to me
- is sent to an e-mail address I do not recognise
- is sent to any of my 'spam trap' e-mail addresses (for information dummy they are all anagrams of 'you are a fool' e.g. louafeaoroy@...)
- is sent to 'undisclosed recipients'
- I examine the 'From' field and don't bother with:
- any e-mail with a blank 'from' field
- from anyone with an e-mail address with a random combination of letters e.g. I will accept as possibly genuine david4387@... but not jwp5tzphw@...
- anyone with pharmacy, casino or a drug name or company in the e-mail address
- After all of the above are automatically permanently deleted by my e-mail filters they then examine the subject field:
- No subject - deleted unless the sender is on my contact list
- If the subject is 'Hi', 'Hello', 'Urgent', 'ATTENTION!' or any other meaningless phrase - deleted unless the sender is in my contact list.
- I get offended by swearwords and vulgarity so my filters will permanently delete any e-mails which contain either. I will never see them
- there are keywords my filters look for. If these are found in a subject then the e-mail is permanently deleted unless the sender is in my contact list. I will never see e-mails about fake watches, drugs, dieting, banks I don't belong to, parcel services I don't use, lotteries, corporate offers or anything mentioning 'girlfriend', 'sweetheart', 'her', 'super' etc.
- If your spam refers to any body part in any way I won't ever see it unless you are on my contact list.
- I will look at the subjects of what is left:
- if it's not in my language - I delete it
- if the subject contains words which contain spaces - V I A G R A or numbers/symbols replacing letters - Cia1;s then you know I don't want to receive it so why bother sending it?
- I will NEVER follow a link in an e-mail from a bank
- While the tax authorities may owe me money I know they never contact people by e-mail to tell them about it. Neither do they e-mail messages to say you owe money, and they certainly don't have a domain such as hmrc.gov.uk.tv
- Only a fool would buy a watch from a spammer without being able to see it - it's merely a good way to receive nothing and lose your credit card details - so I won't read it.
- The same is true for drugs or anything taken by mouth
- No matter how embarrassed a person is they would have to be a complete moron to trust any part of their anatomy to a surgeon promoted by spam. Good candidates for Darwin awards.
- Someone I don't know sends me details of a stock which is going to make my fortune? Yeah. Right - of course I believe it and will invest heavily
- Someone offers me a job working for 'just a few hours each day' - bin it
- Is there really anyone left on Internet who will fall for the Nigerian style money transfer scam? No I'm not going to give any stranger, no matter what he/she promises, my bank details and then wire funds which haven't cleared anywhere.
- Begging letters? No - I'm too mean to respond to genuine ones and too wise to fall for the sob stories
- Online casino promoted by spam? Of course I believe they will pay out and not steal my credit card details if I'm daft enough to bet any of my own money - deleted!
- Now what about the rest?
- If a subject seems genuine my e-mail filters will still scan the content and delete any which contain content which had it appeared in the subject line, would have been deleted
- If something seems too good to be true I naturally suspect it isn't and delete it
- If the content is a graphic attachment only - deleted
- If the content contains a 'nasty' - My anti-malware program will get rid of it
- If the content contains lots of downloadable graphics, my e-mail program won't download them - and neither will I
- I will open the rest of my e-mail BUT if I find a content unrelated to the subject I will:
- add the sender to spam blacklists
- complain to the ISP of the sender about spam and I will use the IP address of the sender, not the forged e-mail address. If that means complaining about someone who has unwittingly become part of a botnet - tough. Tearn to protect your computer with anti-malware software and stop inflicting pain on the rest of us.
- add the domain of any web host who fails to respond to my complaint about spam to blacklists
- complain to the web host of any URL promoted about the site being promoted by spam
- If you use a spambot to search my website for e-mail addresses it will find LOADS of totally useless e-mail addresses, links to spam blacklists and a very useful link to a site called WPOISON which will provide more useless dummy e-mail addresses to fill up your spam lists.
As you can see I have a thing about spam so my final bit of advise is:
Don't send it to me!
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