CONSUMER ALERT

MIKE COX
ATTORNEY GENERAL

The Attorney General provides Consumer Alerts to inform the public of unfair, misleading or deceptive business practices, and to provide information and guidance on other issues of concern.

SPAM REDUCTION - 
TIPS FOR REDUCING JUNK E-MAIL

Consumers are now plagued not only with the usual flood of telemarketing calls and junk mail clogging their mailboxes, but they have seen a huge leap in the quantity of “Spam” – unsolicited commercial e-mail – stuffing their e-mail inboxes. 

Your best weapon against spam is to exercise caution in providing your e-mail address at websites, chat rooms, newsgroups, message boards, mailing lists and other locations on the Internet that are accessible to people you don’t know. Your personal information is valuable – guard it carefully!

DANGERS OF JUNK E-MAIL

Junk commercial e-mail is a consumer headache for a variety of reasons, some obvious and some less so. Some of the hazards of spam include:

• Overfilling e-mail accounts so that personal messages cannot be received
• Carrying viruses
• Displaying unwanted pornographic images
• Displaying other adult content to children without parental permission
• Offering bogus “deals” that seem too good to be true – and usually are just that
• Luring consumers to provide valuable, private personal information, which increases
  your risk of becoming a victim of ID theft
• Generating even more unwanted spam for those who open or reply to junk e-mail messages

HOW SPAMMERS GET YOUR E-MAIL ADDRESS

Spammers most commonly get your e-mail address from public Internet sites where you unsuspectingly have provided your address. Your address is retrieved by computer programs written to “harvest” your information, then added to a database, merged with other databases, and sold by address brokers. Given the speed and low cost of electronic communications, this process multiplies the amount of spam you receive with lightening speed.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently led an investigation to determine how consumers’ e-mail addresses wind up in the databases of junk e-mailers. Investigators in the study “seeded” a variety of Internet services with e-mail addresses, then monitored the spam those e-mail addresses received. Here are the results of the study by type of service where e-mail addresses were provided by investigators posing as typical Internet users:

 

TYPE OF SERVICE	PERCENT RECEIVING SPAM WITHIN 6 WEEKS
Chat Rooms	100 (one address received its first spam within 8 minutes)
Newsgroups	86
Web Pages	86
Free Personal Web Page Services	50
Message Board Postings	27
E-mail Service Directories	9

HOW TO LIMIT JUNK E-MAIL

Following the study, the FTC recommended several strategies for reducing the amount of spam consumers receive:  

1. Consider "masking" your e-mail address.  Masking involves putting a word or phrase in your e-mail address so that it will trick a harvesting computer program, but not a person. For example, if your e-mail address is "johndoe@myisp.com," you could mask it as "johndoe@spamaway.myisp.com." Be aware that some newsgroup services or message boards won't allow you to mask your email address and some harvesting programs may be able to pick out common masks.

2. Use a separate screen name for chatting. If you use chat rooms, use a screen name that's not associated with your e-mail address.  Consider using the screen name only for online chat. 

3. Set up disposable addresses.  Decide if you want to use two e-mail addresses - one for personal messages and one for posting in public.  Consider using a disposable e-mail address service that creates separate e-mail addresses that forwards to your permanent account.  If one of the disposable addresses begins to receive spam, you can shut it off without affecting your permanent address.

4. Use two e-mail accounts.  If you work for a business or organization that wants to receive e-mail from the public, consider creating separate accounts or disposable e-mail addresses for that purpose, rather than having an employee's address posted in public.

5. Use a unique e-mail address, containing both letters and numbers. Your choice of e-mail address may affect the amount of spam you receive because some spammers use "dictionary attacks" to e-mail many possible name combinations at large ISPs or e-mail services, hoping to find a valid address.

Meantime, what can you do with the spam in your in-box? Report it, making sure that you include the full e-mail header. The information in the header makes it possible to follow up on your complaint. Send your spam to:

• The Federal Trade Commission at spam@uce.gov. The FTC uses the e-mails in this database to pursue law enforcement actions against people who send deceptive spam.   

• Your ISP's abuse desk. Often the e-mail address is abuse@yourispname.com or postmaster@yourispname.com. Forwarding your spam to your ISP lets them know about the spam problem on their system and helps them to stop it. Include a copy of the spam, along with the full e-mail header, and at the top of the message, state that you're complaining about being spammed.  

• Most ISPs want to cut off spammers who abuse their system. Include a copy of the message and header information and state that you're complaining about spam.

Source:  http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/alerts/spamalrt.htm 

The FTC’s web page for its recent spam investigation is: http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2002/11/netforce.htm

Additional tips recommended by the Attorney General’s office include:

1.  Review privacy policies of websites that request your e-mail address or any other personal information and determine whether your private information will be provided to third parties.  Good privacy policies will specifically state that your e-mail address and other personal information will not be provided to another party without your express permission.  If a website doesn't clearly explain its practices to your satisfaction, don't provide your personal information.

2.  Do not open, and never respond, to junk e-mail.  Although spammers say they will remove you from their list if you "opt out", many will use your response as an indicator that your account is active and will send you additional junk e-mail and sell your address to other marketers.

3.  Exercise extreme caution before you buy anything – and never provide your credit card number – to businesses that advertised through spam.  

4.  Learn about the filtering options available in your e-mail program, and consider using special filtering software; there are numerous free and for-purchase filtering options available. For examples, visit http://www.michigan.gov/ag/0,1607,7-164-17334_17364_18380-47062--,00.html

More tips and other information about spam is available on the Attorney General’s website at the High Tech Crime Unit’s “Say No to Spam” web page: http://www.michigan.gov/ag/0,1607,7-164-17334_17364_18380---,00.html

Consumers may send objectionable spam to the Federal Trade Commission at spam@uce.gov.