Spam is usually considered to be bulk email, but in reality, you can consider any unsolicited message, newsgroup, message board posting or website to be spam. Most of it is commercial in nature, often promoting dubious products or get-rich-quick schemes. Spam costs the sender very little. Spamming software and email lists can cost a few thousand dollars, but because of the massive amount of addresses that are sent mail, the small percentage of people that fall for the scheme make it worthwhile.

The type of spam you will be most familiar with as an Internet user is email spam. Primarily, you will find yourself placed on an spammers list though use of your email address on message boards, chat-rooms and through some web purchases. A common way for companies to make extra money is to sell customer's email addresses to large clearinghouse companies. These companies collect buyer habits and then distribute them to companies in the various fields of their service area. Once this information is released, your information is now on a journey that may end up in the hands of many different companies, each with their own agenda's and rules regarding how they handle their customer information. Once again, these companies may continue to sell the information they have received or gathered. Another common method used by spammers is to use software, lists of common names and email to generate massive lists. This type of method is commonly called a "dictionary style" attack. Once again, as costs are low and as these types of programs can generate millions of email addresses, this is one of the most common attacks.

One particularly nasty variant of email spam is sending spam to mailing lists (public or private email discussion forums.) Because many mailing lists limit activity to their subscribers, spammers will use automated tools to subscribe to as many mailing lists as possible, so that they can grab the lists of addresses, or use the mailing list as a direct target for their attacks.

As one may have noticed, often your email address is not present anywhere in the send-to or cc lines of the message. This is achieved by the spammers abusing a feature of email called BCC, or Blind Carbon Copy. Blind carbon copy is designed to allow a person to send email out to individuals without showing the list of recipients. Use of this field, along with spoofed or faked email headers is why you will see email from all varieties, sometimes even claiming to come from you!

Now, all this information on email collection and spamming should not hinder you from making purchases online. Most respectable business will have their policies presented on how they collect and use their customer information on their website (usually in a privacy policy) and should allow you to opt-in or out of various policies regarding email promotions. Before making purchases, check for this information and if what they present does not agree with you, I would advise taking your business elsewhere.

For those that still use USENET newsgroups, you will notice more and more spam occurs in the groups you frequent. Unless you have good moderators, spam will continue to be a problem. Many groups usage has dried up or moved elsewhere because of the spam issues.

What Green Apple does about spam?

Green Apple Inc does not allow our customers to send spam through our system. This is clearly stated in our policy. We also have protected our email servers from spam relaying, this is, where a person whom is not a Green Apple dialup subscriber, uses our server to send spam. This is achieved by permitting an email to pass thru our server if and only if it is addressed to or coming from a Green Apple account. Our servers support the Realtime Blackhole Lists of several systems. These systems help stop spam from known spam sources and compromised machines. The program that utilize the blackhole lists is called SpamHater. This is an opt-in program. If you opt to be in the SpamHater program,  then all email sent to you would go through a more advanced set of filters and by doing so, blocks roughly 70-75% of incoming spam email. Unfortunately, there is a small possibility of the SpamHater program blocking a legitimate email, but is very unlikely. Even if it does, we can make exceptions in this special case. To be added to this list, send an email to our Spamcop account at spamcop@greenapple.com

What is Spamcop

Spamcop is your contact for all spam related email and problems. Spamcop handles all incoming request to be added to our SpamHater filter, spam questions and resources. Contact the Spamcop whenever you have spam related issues. Spamcop is named to coincide with a popular anti-spam site and tool named Spamcop.net. Spamcop.net allows individuals to report spammers directly and help contribute their incoming spam and it's sender to the various Realtime Blackhole Lists used by ISPs such as Green Apple. The spamcop at Green Apple is not associated with this company, nor is this address a contact source for this site, but the concepts are similar, just scaled down to fit with Green Apple's system.

So why do I still get spam?

Unfortunately, spam is still an everyday part of the Internet. We can not stop spam until we know about it and once a spammer's account has been terminated by his ISP, nothing stops him from getting a new account elsewhere. As spammers move from machine to machine and service, it is difficult to track down the source and block it. The Realtime Blackhole Lists and SpamHater do a good job, but it is impossible to catch everything. This is primarily due to weaknesses in the established email systems in use throughout the world.

So what do I do if I get spam?

If you haven't already taken steps to reduce spam, then there are techniques available that you can use.

1. If you are not already on our SpamHater list, request that your email address be added. Simply send an email to "spamcop@greenapple.com" to request your email to be screened against our spam lists. This blocks roughly 40-75% of incoming spam, but there is a very small chance it will filter out legitimate email as well.
2. For Outlook and Outlook Express users, there are built in tools to filter your mail before it reaches your inbox.  The first tool is the Block Senders List. If you receive a message that is unwanted, just left click to highlight the message then click Message > Block Sender > Yes > OK. From now on, the senders email is blocked and sent straight to the delete items.  Another technique with Outlook/Outlook Express is message rules. This is a way to filter mail based on several different criteria.
3. You can file an abuse report with the system where the spam originated, but usually they are aware of it before you even get the spam. If you receive numerous spams from the same source, then you might want to take action. Please email our Spamcop account and make sure to forward the spam, as an attachment if possible. We will look at it and add the source to our mail relay block.
4. A last resort effort would be to change your email address. This technique would force you to contact others to give out your new address. If your email address is also the login for your account, then your account (including email and web page) must be reset. These two items must be backed up before the account reset or else both will be lost. Despite these reasons, this can be an effective means of reducing spam.

 
This document is copyright Green Apple, Inc, 1995-2007.  Permission is granted for the free distribution of it provided that its contents, including this notice, are not in any way altered. Green Apple disclaims all responsibility of fitness and suitability of this document. User is responsible for any software they download or install. It is incumbent upon User to read and obey copyright and licensing notices of all the software they use.
 

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