George Mindling Column 8-24-2005 - Spam e-mails

George Mindling Column 8-24-05 For Immediate Release

Spam e-mails present a unique problem to the small business owner. Deleting e-mails from unknown sources is a quick and easy way of avoiding unwanted viruses and worms from the Internet on your home e-mail. Your business e-mail address is a different story. 

Every e-mail is a potential inquiry about future business, and unless the subject line is obviously a spam attempt, the business owner is compelled to open the message and see if it is a valid message.

I maintain a web site dedicated to the old Air Force unit I served in. On the web site I have several photos of my particular class, one of which was taken in Pueblo, Colorado. We were enroute from Lowry AFB in Denver to the Tactical Missile School at Orlando AFB and stopped for one last class photo session. We all piled onto a MG-TD while the owner of the car snapped the photo. I had posted the photo and forgotten about it until I received an e-mail I almost deleted without opening.

The son of the car owner had stumbled across the photo while surfing the net. His dad had it on his bedroom dresser thirty some odd years ago. He found my address and sent me an e-mail about the photo and his dad who lives in California. He called his dad, who is just now getting on the Internet for the first time, and we have spent the last several days catching up, both on the Internet, and by telephone. But it almost didn’t happen.

I went back to review my Spam filters and how to prevent deleting messages that are not harmful or just outright marketing junk. Spam, not the meat product from Hormel Foods, is a name for e-mail junk messages and advertising.

There are several web sites devoted to spam and how to combat it. One such site is http://spam.abuse.net/. The problem Internet web site owners have is malicious software, called “bots,” scan web sites looking for e-mail addresses that get added to marketing lists that dump out everything from fake pharmaceuticals to growth potions and gadgets for anything you may want to increase. Except your wallet.

Traditional E-mail marketing uses the premise that it is far more price competitive to market to an existing customer than to advertise for new customers. That is a valid marketing technique, one that allows a customer to voluntarily sign up for mailing lists and announcements. Those e-mails, however, do not come from culling unsuspecting web sites.

I have now added several JavaScripts, small computer programs, on the several web sites I maintain to test a method of preventing the “bots” from harvesting my e-mail address. The small JavaScripts are available from many sources on the web, simply search for Javascripts and spam blockers to find what is available. Most are free downloads. If they work the way I hope, I should reduce my junk mail considerably.

Hopefully, I haven’t deleted any messages I should have read.

George Mindling