Spring Cleaning for Spam
Is it just me, or is there a whole lot more SPAM lately?
Over the past several weeks, I've spent much more time taking junk out of my inbox than ever before, mostly from the same repeat offenders, and it makes me wonder how "Christian Debt Collectors" and "MilitaryDotCom" keep slipping past my "Junk" filter in my mail client. Is spam getting smarter?
Whenever I think of spam, I think of David Warlick's excellent post back in 2006 about taking the world cost of SPAM ($198 billion projected for 2007 according to Dave's source back in 2006) and asking students to figure out what could be done with that money rather than lose it on spam. Dave's point is to raise awareness of the "ethics of information" with students: that spam, hacking, and viruses cost all of us a lot.
If you haven't played around with a "Spam Calculator" (and there are plenty out there) it's fun to "freak yourself out" by finding out the amount spam costs an organization. For instance, I put into one calculator a scenario of a School District with 500 staff members. I gave each staff member an incredibly low amount of daily spam (5 messages) and averaged employee salaries to $36,000 per person. With storage costs, user productivity costs, management and downtime costs due to spam, it would cost a district $37,086 a year for spam. That's another teacher's salary.
In a time of major budget cuts hitting schools, the reality of that number really hits home.
In looking at my overstuffed mailbox this weekend, I asked myself, "Am I doing my part in fighting spam?" According to my web research, there's more I could be doing. The Federal Trade Commission has some tips that help to cut down on "Unwanted Email" and two hit home in particular.
First off, I need to return to the strategy of "using a dummy email when signing up at sites" (I used to be religious about this but must admit, I've grown lazy in this). Not only should this be a "dummy" address, but it should be one that is a unique name and not susceptible to "dictionary attacks" which spammers use to drum up possible name combinations at large email services. So, an email like johnsmith will get more spam than js23Oow.
Another strategy is to stop displaying my email in public. I'm guilty of this on my own website, where even though I know it's bad practice, I have a link to my email address rather than a graphic or even replacing the "@" symbol with "at" and the "." with "dot", such as: "bob at bobsprankle dot com".
The FTC also encourages users to send a copy of spam to them: spam@uce.gov. This helps them create a database that may help in pursuing spammers with legal actions.
I'm off to clean up my own sites that hand my email address over to spammers like candy... right after I weed all the spam out of my mail client. Time to do a little spring cleaning of my own.