Under - options – Receipts – Turn on “Never send read receipt.”
Under – Options – Security – Turn on “Block Images and other external content in HTML e-mail.”
Under – options – Security- Turn on “Warn me when other applications try to send mail as me”
Type in addresses, don’t click the imbedded link in the e-mail.
Search google for the URLs instead of using what is in an e-mail.
Scroll the page down all the way to the bottom of the page, when filling out forms on a page. Many pages are designed to be long enough to hide the box that Tells them not to give out your e-mail address, and for them to not send you product e-mails.
Unsubcribe from legitamit sites right away to minimze other places being given your e-mail address.
I know Gmail has a lot of detractors, and when I signed up, I was unsure myself. Web-based email just seemed so cheap and nasty (okay for backpackers and cheating husbands, but not for “real” users). Now that I’ve got it, I haven’t looked back. On several ISPS, I was getting between 100 - 200 spams messages daily. On Gmail, I get about one a fortnight, and I’m unaware of any legitimate ones being blocked. I’m converted, and will never need to fire up an email client again.
I set up a whitelist for my email - anything that doesn’t come from an email address I already know is filtered into a spam folder. I check the spam folder every day to make sure I haven’t accidently filtered out someone because they’ve used a different email address or something, but when I’m in a hurry I know for sure that every single message in my in-box is a genuine message from someone I know (or a list I’ve approved).
To set up this sort of whitelist in Outlook Express, go to Tools, Message Rules, Mail, New, tick “Where the from line contains people”. Click on the blue underlined phrase “contains people” and add the addresses from your address book that you want to receive messages from. Then use Options to change “contains people” to “does not contain”. Under “Choose Actions for this rule”, tick “Move to the specified folder”. Then click on the blue underlined word “specified” and specify which folder you want your spam moved to.
Whenever someone gets a new email address or changes their existing one you need to remember to add that to your whitelist.
For Australians only, there’s an option to fight back against spam. Go to www.acma.gov.au, click through Internet, Spam, Spam Matters and download the plugin for your email client. When you receive spam mail, clicking the Spam Matters button will send a report to the ACMA. As it is illegal to send spam to Australians if there is ever a prosecution your report could be used against the spammer. Be warned though - it’s a bit buggy. I find it doesn’t always report the message you have selected. This makes the whitelist even more useful as it puts all your spam in one, neat directory and so it doesn’t matter which message it reports for you as all there are spam and need to be reported in turn. Otherwise it might make sense to manually shift your spam to another directory before reporting it, and set it up to delete the message after it is reported.
One more thing - the anti-spam group I used to frequent some years back had several members who claimed to have created new, unused, “clean” email addresses and then “unsubscribed” them from spammer’s lists. They subsequently began receiving spam at those addresses. This is an experiment you could try for yourself using any of the free email providers.
This is somthing that has just improved in the last year, since the laws were passed about a year ago. What was the best way to handle all spam before that, isn’t necessarly the best way any longer. You have to use all methods to your advantage to optimize the results. The steps I listed work very well and add in the other listed methods of others. I didn’t get more detailed, because I had to quit somewhere, and I listed what most people can do easily.
What you’re describing is is known as a “web bug”. A clear 1x1 pixel. It doesn’t have to be this, of course, it could be a 100x100 picture just as easily; one that was already intended to be in the mail.
A web bug can be tailored to your individual e-mail address. We, my old company, experimented with adding one at the very top and very bottom of the e-mail. From that we could guess how fast your connection speed was, by recording the time between when the first and last bug was served. (This was to be used for “rich media” mailings, to be sent to high-speed customers only.)
We experimented with per-user bugs, too, but that’s very costly - it requires you to have a big database on the backside recording the custom pixel address vs. email address.
Usually we used generic bugs, per mailing, but not per user. What our clients were interested in was “open rates”. How many users discard email based on nothing more than the header vs how many opened it (and presumably read it). This is aggregate data and individualized bugs weren’t necessary.
If we wanted to know legitimate vs. broken addresses, we could, and did, scrape our outgoing mailer logs. We knew successful delivery rates and could tell a “dirty list” from a legitmate opt-in list by the bounce rates pretty dependably. (Our contract with our clients said that we only accepted lists that were opt-in, not harvested or purchased. Despite this, we knew certain clients would buy lists on occaision. We had, a couple of times, cancelled a client’s contract due to consistent abuse of the opt-in policy).
The illegitimate spammer isn’t going to use a web-bug. They’re a volume business, sending a million, delivering ten-thousand is OK by them. Processing inbound bounces and inbound web-bugs are beyond their scope. If they’re running their own servers, they’re discarding or redirecting their bounces so they don’t see them. If they’re just pumping through and ISP, they’ll probably be faking their return addresses.
The spam emails one of my accounts has been getting lately don’t even have unsubscribe links. Almost 99% of it is for online pharmacies, or stock spam written in what I call “alpha male English.”