Fighting Spam for Dummies

Rating:
Summary: Limited advice, mostly for end users
Review: A simple book, aimed squarely at the typical email user. Systems administrators wishing for guidance on stopping spam will find little here that they don't already know.

Some of the advice, like blocking messages from an undesirable sender, is of limited use. Only works against a spammer who has not forged the sender line. This has been an enduring problem with spam. Likewise, the book offers advice on analysing the header trail. But again, the spammer can control [forge] much of the header data.

There is good advice on the opt-in and opt-out mechanisms purportedly offered by several sender companies. Mainstream companies will indeed honour your requests. Good. But, as the book explains, a spammer can turn your request against you, since she now knows that your email address is valid and actively read, which increases the value of it to her.

Rating:
Summary: one to pay attention to
Review: ISPs should buy this book in bulk and mail it out to every new customer. Then they shouldn't turn on the customer's connectivity until they've passed a test on the contents. If they actually did that, users wouldn't make the silly mistakes like responding to remove instructions to verify their addresses for spammers.

I thought I knew everything there was to know about spam, but found myself changing things on my system even before I had completely finished the book.

For someone without the time to read the whole book, I'd suggest reading chapters 2,4,5,12 and the one for your specific email client. If you haven't picked an email client yet, and are among the 95% of the world running a windows desktop, I agree with his recommendation to use Eudora. They have a free sponsored version with reasonable filtering. Get the spamnix plugin, learn procmail if your ISP lets you use it, and you're most of the way home to a spam free mailbox.

And never, ever respond to remove instructions. It proves that you have a valid email address, that you will read a spam to the bottom to find the remove instructions, and are gullible enough to believe anything a spammer tells you. Spammers love people like that, because that's the kind of person that may actually make them a buck someday.