Crusading Against Spam - Part II
With a Bush Administratin and Congress that seems owned by te DMA, the business of stopping spam is in your own hands. And yes, it can be controlled. To quote Jim Louderback, Editor-in-Chief at PC Magazine:
We can’t rely on someone else to fix this problem…Although the bad guys are ultimately to blame, each of us, individually and collectively, holds the power to wipe them out. “
First line of Defense
Our host has a spam blocker for all our email. If you host with us, we can provide you with a spam blocker for $10 a year. We also have a spam blocker on our personal system that catches some of the stuff that gets through. If spam or a phish makes it this far, the IP and domain goes into our black list that is at:
http://www.creatingnewworlds.org/stopspam.cfm. This goes to hackers that like to nuke hosts that pass spam. Sometimes (for U.S. hosts), we’ve notified the state attorney general. After all, it is illegal (as a result of the CAN-SPAM act.) To get off the black list, the spammer has to pay us a fine.
There are many black lists out there maintained by various companies and people. There are also servers that send out automatic updates on these lists to those that subscribe to them. Ours is free.
Once you are aggressive on this with your own black list, you better have good protection on your system as the bad guys will target you. You need good antivirus, both hardware and software firewalls, and a good anti-spyware system.
Protecting Your Web Design
Never put your email address on any of your web pages. There are plenty of those bad guys that farm pages to get email addresses off the source code to spam and phish. Use a form for people that wish to contact you. Our contact form is at http://www.netadventures.biz/opmcontact.htm. You can look at the source for this page and see an email address, but it is a virtual address and won’t work. The form processor on the host converts the virtual address to a real address and the form works - and we are protected.
Stopping Blog Spam
After we got 27 blog spams in one hour (we think someone was targeting our blog), we realized we had to do something. We added a really good spam blocker to our blog, and even the bad guys are complementing us. If someone spams our blogs now, they get a warning. If they continue to spam, the blocker gets more aggressive. Moreover, the blocker learns with time and gets better the longer, automatically creating its own black list. It is totally automatic - no work on my part. If you do send a real comment and it gets blocked, use our comment form to let us know. The thing stopped 11 blog spams the first day.
What About You?
If you need help in this for your system, we are available. We can even help you start your own black list. Contact us by phone or email.