Monday, April 23, 2001		Article

Do not unsubscribe from spammer's list
By Vipul Verma

E-MAIL is the lifeline of modern communication system. Those with computer and an access to the Net use e-mail as a preferred medium for communication. However, despite hundreds of options available in e-mails, the hunt for the best e-mail system is always on for a majority of people.

Normally Web mails are popular but most of them suffer from the inability to be configured into e-mail account. Though you can configure some Web mails like Yahoo! , Hotmail etc. in your browser yet due to some problems, it does not work out to be absolute. For example, if you configure Yahoo! Web mail in your e-mail client, then you can easily receive e-mails but sending e-mails there is a lot of problem.

Despite the fact that Web mails are versatile and also universal, they too have limitations. Similarly in case of POP mails, the main problem is that it is basically dependent on the ISP as they provide you their POP and SMTP address. If you have to change your ISP, then your e-mail address also changes.

As nobody would like his e-mail address changed quite often then what’s the perfect solution?

Well! The perfect solution to these problems basically lies in the trade off between the two options. Thus if you combine the best of both the worlds, then you can strike the best e-mail solution yourself. For example, if you have Yahoo! e-mail address and want to use it as your basic e-mail account, then a good solution can be worked out in the following way. Use the POP address of the Yahoo! e-mail i.e. pop.mail.yahoo.com and the SMTP address of your ISP, for sending e-mails. Also use the e-mail address of Yahoo! account in the e-mail client. Now, since you have configured the e-mail client to receive the e-mails through Yahoo! account, it will work perfectly for you. But using the ISP’s, SMTP address for sending e-mails will solve all your problems related to the sending the mail.

Moreover since with your outgoing mail your Yahoo! e-mail address will be shown, thus it would not matter, which SMTP address you use. This is thus a good solution for having single and permanent e-mail address for life. Thus if you change your ISP in future, you need not worry as this will not affect your e-mail address. All you would need to do is change the SMTP address of the old ISP with the one you are using currently and your permanent e-mail will keep on working for you. The procedure for configuring it is also very simple and the only thing you need to remember is to give your permanent e-mail address as your main e-mail address and give the SMTP address of your ISP and the username correctly. So, this way you can work out an excellent solution

Another issue related to e-mail is spam. Electronic junk mail or junk newsgroup postings. Some people define spam even more generally as any unsolicited e-mail. However, if a long-lost brother finds your e-mail address and sends you a message, this could hardly be called spam, even though it is unsolicited. Real spam is generally e-mail advertising for some product sent to a mailing list or newsgroup.

Spam is basically an unsolicited e-mail on the Internet. Some apparently unsolicited e-mail are, in fact those which the users’ agreed to receive when they registered with a site and checked a box agreeing to receive postings about particular products or interests. This is known as both, opt-in e-mail and permission-based e-mail. Spam is normally considered as an Internet nuisance and unnecessary consumes your time to either read it. If left unread, it consumes the inbox space.

The first thing to be remembered about spam is not to reply to any mail received on such a list. Sometimes, spammers may post unsolicited message to a mailing list you are on. However tempting as it may be, do not complain about the spam on the list. You can complain to the spammer’s ISP, or you can tell the list administrator to implement stronger measures against list spamming. If you reply to spam on the list, however, your message also becomes a spam and thus you also unknowingly become a part of this chain.

Do not to unsubscribe from a spammer’s list. Even if you do unsubscribe, your name normally does not get out of the spammer’s list. Thus once you identify a message as spam, don’t trust anything in it, not even the unsubscribe information it contains. This is merely a line and does not mean anything, but it could harm you further, if you try to unsubscribe.

The logic behind this is simple. Normally people put bulk mails in the ignore list and thus they are dormant mails for all particular purposes and often get deleted unread after a particular interval of time. However, if you try to unsubscribe it, then it means an active address for the spammer as you have opened the mail, only then you are trying to unsubscribe it. This in turn proves more fatal as spammers sell the e-mail address to others also considering it as a live e-mail address. So, you should be careful in not replying to these mails.

Remember in a majority of cases, you yourself are responsible for falling prey to the spam. However, if you were to subscribe to these offers, then you should never use your primary e-mail address. Common when you sign up on a Web site, you are normally being offered so-called additional services, for which you have to provide your e-mail address. You never know what will happen to that e-mail address. It might even be sold to spammers. Instead you can use an account at any of the free Web-based e-mail services or any other e-mail address, which you do not bother to see much or which you do not use for your normal purposes.

Another precaution to avoid spam is to redirect all messages with subjects such as "ADV" directly to the trash box. As due to some legislative attempts to control Spam, spammers sometimes include "ADV:" at the begging of the subject line to make their unsolicited message appear legitimate. Thus directing all such mail directly to trash is a good idea to avoid them.