All About AntiSpam Software

We will never share, sell, or rent your personal information with anyone without your advance permission.

How often have you come across this line. If you ask me, I would say that I see this almost everytime I register for something online. But still, I doubt if each one of those people getting your personal information ever stick to their word. If they had , there would never exist anything called spam.

Ok, there is one way you can find out who is spamming you, or rather who leaked your info. All you need is a gmail account. If you already have one, here is how you proceed.

Gmail offers the facility to use multiple email addresses. In the sense that suppose my email id is example@gmail.com, any email of the form example+xyz@gmail.com also reaches my inbox.

So, each time you register to a particular website, provide your email address as yourid+websitename@gmail.com.

Now, all these mails from all the sites get into your inbox. You need to classify the mails according to the source. To do this, go to settings inside your account. Here, click Filter. Set a unique label for all emails that are delivered to that one particular yourid+websitename@gmail.com email id.

Now, you only need to keep track of whether all the emails delivered under one label are from one particular website only. If there is another website sending you an email from a label that it is not supposed to send to, then you can very easily make out that it is this website that leaked your information to the spammer!!

If you use the POP email capability of the hosting company where your web site resides, there is a good chance that you may have overlooked an easily cured spam problem.

Most hosting companies include 50 or 100 email accounts with any hosting plan offered. Multiple email accounts can come in very handy - you can create separate email destinations for various functions such as new orders, customer service, technical questions. If you use email accounts in addition to the default email account created when you set up your hosting plan, you could unknowingly find yourself with a big spam problem.

Here is an example. Let's say that I purchase hosting for my website domain called jonathanginsbergdotcom.  When this hosting plan is set up, a default email account called jonath (at) jonathanginsbergdotcom was set up automatically by the hosting company's software.

Being the business tychoon that I am, I decide that I am not going to use "jonath" as my email address , but instead would prefer to set up three other accounts: "orders (at) jonathanginsberg dot com," "techsupport (at) jonathanginsberg dot com," and "owner (at) jonathanginsberg dot com." I therefore set up POP accounts for each of these three email addresses and I commence to run my business.

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Spam will continue spreading as far as it makes profit. If nobody buys from spammers or acts upon their scams, spam will end. This is the obvious and easiest way to fight spam. You can ignore and delete spam emails you receive. But you can also take vengeance on the spammer by complaining to the spammer's Internet Service Provider (ISP). The ISP will block their connection and maybe impose a fine (depending on the ISP's acceptable usage policy). Spammers beware of such complaints and try to disguise their messages. That's why finding the right ISP is not always easy.

Let’s look inside a spam message. Every email message includes two parts, the body and the header. The body is the actual message text and attachments. The header is a kind of the envelope of the message. The header shows the address of the message sender, the address of the message recipient, the message subject and other information. Email programs usually display these header fields:

    From: shows the sender's name and email address.
    To: shows the recipient's name and email address.
    Date: shows the date when the message was sent.
    Subject: shows the message subject.

The From: field usually contains the sender's email address. This lets you know who sent the message and allows you easily reply. Spammers, of course, don’t want you to reply and don’t want you to know who they are. Therefore, they put forged email addresses into the From: lines of their emails. So the From: field won’t help you if you want to determine where the spam email comes from.

There are also several Received: fields in the header of every message. Email programs don’t usually display the Received: lines but the Received: lines can be very helpful in tracing the spam origin.

Just like a postal letter goes through a number of post offices before it’s delivered to the recipient, an email message is processed by several mail servers. Each mail server adds a line to the message header – a Received: line – which contains

- the server name and IP address of the machine the server received the message from and
- the name of the mail server itself.

Each Received: line is inserted at the top of the message header. If we want to reproduce the message’s path from sender to recipient, we start from the topmost Received: line and walk down until the last one, which is where the email originated.

Just like the From: field the Received: lines may contain forged information to fool those who would want to trace the spammer. Because every mail server inserts the Received: line at the top of the header, we start the analysis from the top.

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