INDEPTH: SPAM
How you can avoid spam
CBC News Online | November 24, 2003
If possible, have more than one e-mail address. Use one only for your family, friends or business contacts. Use a second for dealing with commercial companies, even ones you do business with regularly (they may sell the address to others). This will reduce spam, not eliminate it, because spammers are usually successful in harvesting e-mail addresses.
If you have a personal website, use a specific address for that site, separate from your personal address. Spammers use crawlers to harvest addresses from websites.
Do not fill out forms on sites asking for personal information, or offering free goods or services or contests, unless you are sure the company is legitimate and you want to do business with them. Then always use your secondary address. These websites are often fronts for "opt-in" agreements that generate a lot of spam.
A legitimate site or company will allow you to change your preferences to opt out of e-mail lists. If you do business with a legitimate company, always look for the box that lets you click "no" to e-mail offers.
If you receive an e-mail, always check the sender's address. Is it someone you know or a company you have dealt with?
Look for unusual sloppiness, bad spelling, poor grammar and typos both in e-mail messages and especially on websites.
If you click to a website (either from a message or from a web search) look for signs of legitimacy including a phone number and a street address. Do not do business with a website that does not offer some form of confirming information.
Check the "return to" e-mail address on an e-mail. If that address is different from the senders address – and that information is not noted in the body in the message – the e-mail may not be legitimate.
Be careful with messages that claim to be from old friends or classmates.
Never click on a spam message that allows you to "opt out" of their mailing list. This is actually used to confirm your address.
If you are active on newsgroups, chat sites and similar locations, add extraneous characters to your e-mail address such as JohnIHATESPAMdoe@isp.com. Legitimate users can delete the extraneous characters. Spammers' robots do not.
How to avoid fraud
Legitimate companies and agencies do not ask for your social insurance number, a bank PIN code, a credit card number or any other personal information by e-mail.
If you are suspicious and it is a company you have done business with, contact its customer service department by telephone using numbers from the phone book or on your regularly mailed bill.
Blocking
The most extreme method is to use e-mail filters, either from your ISP or your e-mail software, that only accept mail from family and friends. Even then it is best not to delete that e-mail but have the ISP or software put it into a special folder so you can check for legitimate e-mail, in case people you want to communicate with change their addresses or that really is a long-lost friend trying to contact you.
You can also use your e-mail software to create special folders for each of your friends and family. Then that e-mail can be found easily while all other e-mail goes into the main inbox and can be checked to see if the messages are legitimate.
Use special folders for any mailing lists you belong to. Thus the mail from the list is separated from your personal e-mail.
Most e-mail software allows an automatic kill function, killing any e-mail from an address you identify as a spammer. This has only limited value since spammers often use an address only once. This can also be used for marketing or other messages from more legitimate companies that refuse or forget to take you off a list.
With some e-mail programs you can create a filter for any message that does not include your specific e-mail address in the To: or CC fields. About two-thirds of these messages are likely to be spam. Warning: this solution may not work if you belong to one or more mailing lists that use To:mymailinglist as an address.
You can also use filters in your e-mail software to send items with a specific subject line to either a folder or the trash.
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November 26, 2003:
On CBC Newsworld, David Gray interviews media lawyer Michael Geist from the University of Ottawa Law School about how to tackle spam.
 Real Video
On CBC Newsworld, Christopher Thomas interviews Ontario privacy commissioner Ann Cavoukian about how Canada is fighting spam.
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