Technical Tips for Small Nonprofits and Social Change Groups:
Seven Tips on Avoiding Spam

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Have your email accounts been rendered unusable by a constant barrage of promotions about investment opportunities, weight loss schemes, online gambling, phallic enlargement, etc? While you probably already know a few good ways to avoid spam, this tip sheet probably includes a few you might not be aware of.

Tip #1: Use an alternate email address for web registrations and commercial email lists.

For example: josesmith@aol.com can set up an account josesmithsignup@yahoo.com for free, just by going to yahoo.com. Then, when Jose wants to set up a login at nytimes.com to read the paper, he can give the alternate email instead of his regular email to the Times.

Tip #2: Disguise any email addresses on your web page. This is pretty easy to do: one method is to just say:

josesmith aol.com

By doing this you allow most people to still access your email address, but you effectively prevent automated software programs that scan hundreds of thousands of web pages for spammable emails from having access to it.

For an even more sophisticated way to do this, go to:

http://www.organizenow.net/home.shtml

and then "view the source" of this page in your web browser. If you go down to the bottom you will note that the link that is labeled "email us" is ENCODED with special characters that show up in the source code of the web page but are hidden on the web browser. The %20 is a space and the %40 is an @ sign. The HTML looks something like this, and it seems to work for us!

mailto:%20oc%40organizenow.net

Tip #3: Use a form for feedback on your web page instead of an email address.

This is highly recommended if your home page gets 100 or more visits a day.

Tip #4: Spam-Protect your organization's email list archives, and get all the email lists you post messages to to do this.

This is vitally important: many organizations are escaping from dependence on ad-based systems like YahooGroups or Topica and moving over to systems based on the free software available at http://www.sympa.org or http://list.org. But these systems are not always set up to provide spam protection the way that Yahoo or Topica are. It can be additional work, but we strongly recommend that you raise hell if your consultant provides you with an email archive that is not spam protected. (If anyone had detailed instructions on turning on spam protection using these systems or linking them with third party archives like MHonarc, please email them to us and we will post them.) It is important to allow people to post to your email list without making their address available to spammers. (The fee-based service at www.npolists.org provides Sympa with spam protection.)

Tip #5: Use Filters

Spam filtering is not always the best solution, as it is not 100% accurate and you can miss an important email. Typically the spam filtering is a piece of free software (on Linux based systems) that is set up on the machine that gathers your email. If your organization is large enough to have a dedicated mail server, there is filtering software that your administrator could install on it. If you use a small Internet Service Provider, spam filtering would need to be set up at the ISP office, something that only some ISPs are willing to do.

If you can't get the people responsible for your mail to filter it, you can do it yourself using the shareware program Mailwasher for Windows, or the new "smart" spam filtering built in to Mac OS X. Mailwasher is extremely interesting because after you mark an email as Spam, Mailwasher will send back a message to the spammer that makes it look as if your email address does not exist. This will actually reduce incoming spam over time, if you are fortunate enough to be the target of spammers who periodically clean up their spamming lists.

If you have a http://mail.yahoo.com account, spam filtering is built-in. If your non-Yahoo email is "POP-based" but gets too much spam, you can "Check Other Email" feature of your Yahoo account to enjoy the benefits of spam filtering at no cost (giving you lots off time to change your email address if necessary).

Tip #6: Set up Temporary Email Accounts and Mail Aliases

If your group has a webhosting account that lets you manage your web domain, you usually can add and delete accounts very easily using the administrative interface provided by the web hosting company. At www.organizenow.net we do this for our annual conference: the conference@organizenow.net email address exists only for the 8 weeks before this annual event. We found out when we reactivated this email in May 2002 that we were still getting spam from last year. So next year we plan to name the email account conf2003 @organizenow.net, which should take care of the problem once and for all!

Tip #7: Avoid using a common first name as an email address.

Have you ever received an email addressed to steve@x.com, steve@y.com, steve@z.com, steve@abc.com, steve@def.com? As you might have already deduced, spammers often buy the list of all registered internet "domain names" and then try tracy@ for a million or more web domains. If only 2% get through, that's a lot of successful spam. So that you will be less likely fall prey to this scam, consider using an email like tracy-j@pta.org rather than tracy@pta.org.

last Updated 11/2002