Letters to the editor

Recipes for dealing with spam Plus: Who took the surprise out of the Waco raid? Hemlock Society founder weighs in on physician-assisted suicide.

Apr 25, 2000 | How to avoid the evil eye
BY SIMSON GARFINKEL
(04/21/00)

Don't register products that you buy. Contrary to what some companies want us to believe, a person does not have to register a product to "activate" a warranty. Or, if you do register, don't include your e-mail address.

Another tactic is to use two e-mail addresses: One with your ISP for personal correspondence with close friends and/or business associates, and another with a Web-based e-mail service (Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, etc.) for all other e-mail. When you access Web-based e-mail, only the message headers, not the full messages, are automatically retrieved. This also provides a certain level of protection against viruses and worms.

Beware of the "mailto" trap on many Web pages. (Salon uses a Web-based "mailto" and does not fit into this category.) If clicking on a link invokes your e-mail program, then do a copy-and-paste of the "To" address into your Web-based e-mail account.

Bottom line: Don't supply your e-mail address to potential spammers.

-- Martin Maloney

You can actually get rid of most spam by filtering out all e-mails that don't have your e-mail address in the To: field. Most spam messages don't actually have your address in the To: column -- spammers use an alias on their mail servers to avoid having to send a separate message to each person on their list from their client.

-- Peter Yared

Simson Garfinkel suggests "address munging" as a way for Internet users to avoid receiving spam. Although this method may work for the individual user, it creates an enormous problem for system administrators in the form of yet more undeliverable, bounced messages.

I sympathize with the desire to avoid receiving junk e-mail, but shifting the problem to someone else is not an appropriate short- or long-term solution.

-- Donna Higgins

There's a way to avoid letting the U.S. Postal Service notify telemarketers of your new address that wasn't mentioned in your recent article on the subject. According to the March-April issue of Utne Reader, you can exit the National Change of Address System by calling the National Customer Support Center at (800) 238-3150. (The same issue contains a wonderfully concise "road map" to all the ways -- both readily available and truly radical -- a person can regain their anonymity.)

-- John Book

Next Page: "What's the problem with polite opt-in offers from companies offering products or services I'm already inclined to consider?"

• View blog reactions