Yesterday, I questioned whether legislation can stop spam. Today, I found and article discussing whether technological solutions can stop spam. The level of optimism in the article seems about on par with the level of success that technology is having in blocking spam: it helps, but the battle is far from over.

One proposed solution...
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If you're like me, you've seen not a decrease, but a dramatic increase in spam since the US anti-spam law was enacted. Why is this? Honestly, I don't know. Does it mean that anti-spam legislation doesn't work? It's obviously not a cure-all. But last month, the first four spammers were charged under the act. While...
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One source of email addresses for spammers is email messages that have been sent to groups or forwarded from one person to another. Today, I'll talk about how to avoid giving out your friends' email addresses when you email them.

We'll start with forwarding. When someone sends you a message and you forward it to...
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A number of services are available these days which offer what they call throwaway email addresses. These are addresses that you use when you don't want to reveal your regular email address. Once they've served their purpose, you stop using them, so it doesn't matter if they get added a spammer's mail list.

An example...
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There's a lot of talk about RSS replacing email for various tasks such as online newsletters, so RSS is an email competitor, right? On the other hand, Aaron Schwartz posted today about an update to his rss2email script, which lets you subscribe to RSS feeds and have them delivered to you by email, and Lockergnome...
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Stopping spam once the floodgates are open is much more difficult than keeping it from starting in the first place. How does one avoid getting their email address into the hands of spammers? Only show your email address to people who need it. Email is useless if no one knows your address, but it also...
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Following up on yesterday's post, there may be one more place to forward your spam. If you have a system where the sender uses a form on your website to send messages, you have the opportunity to record the IP address from which they accessed your site. Then, you can look up the ISP who...
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We've covered a bit of what not to do when you get spam previously--don't click the links. Today, let's talk about what you should do when you receive spam.

Most of the time, just deleting it is probably the best thing to do--don't let other people waste your time. But sometimes, you may want to...
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With RSS and similar technologies in their current state, publishers run the risk of using significantly more bandwidth than with an email newsletter. Why? Let's say you have a list with 20000 subscribers. If you email them all a 2K newsletter once a day, that's 40MB/day of bandwidth. If you have an RSS feed with...
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Many techniques are used for spam filtering: searching for user-specified words or phrases, statistical analysis of text, etc. One of the oldest involves creating a black list of sender email addresses from which all messages are blocked. Spammers have long since learned to work around blacklists by changing their addresses often and even using fake...
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