VBOK Issue # 17 - To Avoid A Spammer December 1, 1998 ______________________________________________________________________ Vote at the VBOK web site! I've added a new feature to the VBOK web site that allows you to vote on certain question that I will pose Things like: What browser do you use? What e-mail software do you use? What type of processor do you have? etc. I will be changing the question once a month and posting the results in the newsletter for all to see. Go here to make your voice heard: If you think of something you'd like to see voted on, let me know at: ______________________________________________________________________ TOC 1. To Avoid A Spammer 2. Software Review 3. Cool Sites 4. Tips, Tricks, Do's and Don't Do's 5. That's the news! If the columns in the below articles appear misaligned, it's because you are using a non-fixed width font. If you would like to see them nice and straight, change your E-mail font to Times New Roman. ______________________________________________________________________ 1. To Avoid A Spammer ------ In the last newsletter, I covered what you should do if you receive SPAM. In this edition, I'm going to tell you some ways to avoid getting it in the first place. Spammers are becoming more and more ingenious in their attempts at coming by valid e-mail addresses for their shotgun attempt to get people to buy their goods and services. Following this advice will in no way completely immunize you from SPAM, but it will help considerably. Spammers selling lists of e-mail addresses to other spammers. ------ If a spammer is going to get your e-mail address, this is most likely where they will get it. There isn't much you can do about it other than to try the below tips so that your address won't appear again. Posting to the Usenet (newsgroups) and/or mailing lists. ------ There is software called harvesters and spiders that comb message bases such as newsgroups and mailing list archives to find e-mail addresses. If you are active on any newsgroups or mailing lists, then there really isn't much you can do about this. Some people have used methods such as inserting text into their e-mail address to foil spammers, but this presents three problems. 1. It makes it confusing for a legitimate user to respond to your messages. 2. The harvesters and spiders are "smart" enough to recognize and remove this text. 3. If it is done incorrectly, you could be tying up resources on your POP3 server. To make this clearer, let's use my e-mail address as an example. It is . The text that people usually put into their e-mail address is "NOSPAM". So now my address would look like: Did you spot problem number one and three yet? This address would cause problems for your POP3 server, because you haven't affected the domain name. All you did was to change the username. The mail is still going to , but now there is a false user . This of course will cause a bounce (because the user doesn't exist), which means your POP3 server must create a message saying so. To correct this problem, you would change the address to: This will alleviate problem three, but you can see where problem one still comes into play. You must provide in your message instructions for removing the text "NOSPAM" from your address so that someone can send you mail. For experienced Usenet users, this isn't too big of a problem, but for novices, they may not understand what they need to do. Either way, harvesters and spiders are getting "smart" enough to remove this text, so it really doesn't do you a whole lot of good anyway. So how do you avoid spam on Usenet and mailing lists? Unfortunately, the only answer is to not post. Signing up for services and allowing them to send you related material. ------ If any of you have signed up for free e-mail services, newsletters, news feeds etc, then you probably saw some questions towards the end asking if you minded having your information made available to companies who may have something interesting for you based upon your demographic data. Let me reword this for you. "Can we sell your name to a spammer so they can send you stuff that might be relevant?" Even if this portion is legit, there's nothing stopping that spammer from further selling your e-mail address. *Always* answer "NO" to these questions if you wish to remain less spammable. Removing the identity info in browser ------ If you want to see just how much information is available on you, here are two places to go to see for yourself. A recommendation: To really get a feel of this, please visit a web site that you will recognize the URL from before clicking on the below links. One piece of data available is the URL that you just came from, so that's why I want you to go to a web site that you know the URL for. -- Junkbusters is a web site dedicated to helping stamp out spammers. -- This is tracking software I use for the VBOK web site. The information it collects helps me to tailor the site to the most common visitor. You will find all sorts of stuff collected on people here. i.e. Web browser version, screen resolution, color bit depth, OS version, where you came from, what keywords you used in a search engine to find my web site. Specifically, check out "System Tracking" and "Referrer Tracking 2". -- The Anonymizer web site provides a service to make you anonymous. See the below section titled "Surf by proxy" -- Now that you know what can be collected on you, how do you stop it from happening? Unfortunately, most of that information can't be turned off. It's environment variables made available by your browser. About the only way you can remain anonymous is to try what's in the next section. Surf by proxy ------ What exactly is a proxy? It's a server that you go through to access the Internet. There's some plusses and minuses associated with doing this. The plusses are that because the proxy server is the one requesting information from the Internet, it's information is made available while keeping your's hidden. Another is that it caches all the pages it finds, so if someone has been to a site before you, then you get the pages from the proxy server. Since the proxy server is physically close to you, the resulting download of the pages is faster. The minuses are that if a proxy server is overloaded, then you can actually be retrieving pages slower than if you went straight to the web site. Also, if the admin person for the proxy server has incorrectly set the time limit for pages to expire, you could be receiving a page that is outdated. Many ISPs provide a proxy server (You'll have to ask your tech support people), but if they don't you can go to a public proxy server at: They provide a free service, but at a cost. There is a built in delay when it retrieves pages. This is to get you to buy their service which has no delay. It's the same old story of you get what you pay for. ------ Hopefully with the help of the above tips, you can shrink that bulls eye on your back and become just a little less spammable. ______________________________________________________________________ 2. Software Review ------ Name: Qtalk by Minidata Systems Ltd. Genre: Voice Chat Platform: PC Win 95/98 (Not available for NT yet.) Type/Cost: Shareware/$10.00 Size: 812K Homepage: Download Software: If you like ICQ, but hate having to run Microsoft Netmeeting every time you want to chat voice, say hello to Qtalk. This little application sits off to the side of your ICQ contacts list just waiting for you to click on it. To chat via voice, you just select anybody from your contact list who's on-line and also has Qtalk installed, and start yakking. The default mode of operation is half-duplex, which means you have to push a button to talk, but if both users have full duplex modems, you can use the hands-free option for uninterrupted chat. I was very surprised by the sound quality for such a small and unobtrusive program. Currently it has been tested on ICQ98a, and is not recommended for any other versions. ------ Name: ICQ99a by Mirabilis/AOL. Genre: Chat/FTP/See if your friend is on-line program. Platform: PC Win 95/98/NT, MAC and Linux. Type/Cost: Freeware Size: 3,707KB As of this writing, ICQ99a isn't available for download from Mirabilis as it has only been released to beta testers. There are sites out there who are illegally making it available, but you might as well wait for the official release as most of the big bugs will have been worked out by then. At any rate here is some of the features you can look forward to. - All previous versions of ICQ allowed you to view your contacts in two ways; those that are currently on-line, and *all* of your contacts. This is alright if you have a small number of contacts, but if you have quite a few and they represent say your co-workers, friends, family, and whatever other categories you can come up with, then ICQ99a is going to be your best friend. You can now place your contacts into groups. No more wondering if the contact you see is a subscriber to your newsletter, a long lost friend, or someone from one of your classes. - A personal web page that resides on your machine. This is good and bad. The good is that the wizard makes it *very* simple to set up your basic web page (no HTML necessary), you can choose from different themes, and there is no hassle of getting web space on a server somewhere and FTPing all your pages to them. The bad part is that people must connect to your IP address (your machine) to see your pages. This of course means that you must be on-line for anybody to connect and see your page. This introduces a problem in that if you get a few people looking at your page at the same time, your connection is going to get bogged down. All in all though it's a very nice feature. BTW, if you do know HTML or are able to use WYSIWYG web page editors, you can edit the pages to your taste. - A whole slew of PIM type features. A to-do list, reminder, and note pad for jotting down those quick ideas. - A vastly improved message/chat history. It is much easier to find conversations and important information in the history now, and you can even forward those tidbits to other contacts. - A much improved e-mail facility that allows you to even use you're default e-mail client software. - In addition to all the nice security features implemented in ICQ98a (ignore, visible/invisible etc.) You can also have a word filter list. Say you don't like the word "meep", you just add this word and any message containing this word is ignored. - The user information has turned into a user life history/database. Most users will opt not to fill in most information (being the private kind of citizens we are), but some of you will love this feature. You can add things such as: A secondary e-mail address, home information (phone, fax, cellular and address (which has a map button to send the address to an on-line service that displays maps of that address and the surrounding area)), work information (pretty much the same type stuff as in the home information), birth date, Zodiac sign, what languages you speak, interests (by category), your picture, and any organizational affiliations you have. You can also save all of this information as a vCard. - You can now add plugins from third party vendors. Two plugins come with the software; a greeting card (which allows you to design and send HTML web browser based cards), and a voice messenger (which allows you to record a voice message which can be sent to other ICQ99a users.) The voice messages can also be stored to disk and used whenever you need them. Well, that about covers all the major features. All in all I was very surprised seeing as how AOL bought out Mirabilis in June of '98. I figured it would have been a bloated cow of a program, but it weighs in at not much more than ICQ98a did. For those of you wishing to add me to your contact list, my ICQ UIN is 216395. I may not always be available for chat, but I can message like nobody's business. ______________________________________________________________________ 3. Cool Sites ------ beta bites This site reviews and tracks tons of beta release software. If you don't know what a beta release is, never fear, I'm about to tell you. Beta software is software that has most of the bugs ironed out, but the programmers wish to test further with a select group of people. After the programmers feel that the software is as bug free as possible, it moves out of the beta stage and into the final release. ------ How to drive like a moron A humorous look into the world of driving (or the lack of ability to do so.) Learn how to become a moron driver. ------ ICQ Sound Packs For those of you who like to personalize everything on your computer, here are theme packs for ICQ. They are a collection of sound files that replace the existing ones in your C:\Program Files\ICQ\Sounds directory. I can't vouch for all of the theme packs on the site, but the ones I downloaded only required you to extract (using Winzip or PKUnzip) to the C:\ directory. For this to happen, the following must be true: One, the path of each file should say "Program Files\icq\Sounds". You find this path information in the last column to the right in the Winzip window after you've opened the ZIP file. Two, when you click the extract button and are presented with a dialog box of where you wish to extract to, the option "Use Folder Names" must be checked and you must have selected the C: as your extract destination (this is if ICQ is indeed on your C:) Happy sounding. ______________________________________________________________________ 4. Tips, Tricks, Do's and Don't Do's ------ You may have run across a site that does something I really hate. Namely bringing up another site's pages inside of their frame. While sometimes this is unavoidable (as I have discovered during the course of building web sites), there is something you can do about it. If you are using Internet Explorer, there are two ways to bust out of a frame. The first is by right clicking on the frame you wish to view in it's own window and selecting "Open frame in new window." The other is to drag the link to the page/site up to the Address bar. In Netscape right click on the page you wish to view in it's own window and select "Open frame in new window." Either way, you'll see the site in it's intended form. ------ If your a fan of IEs auto-complete feature, here's a tip for you. When you type in say "www" it'll auto-complete the last URL that you went to. Let's say that the URL is close but not exactly the page you wanted. While holding down the CTRL key, select the down arrow and you'll see a list of closely related URLs. For example: You type in "www" and it auto-completes "www.0rdernet.com/VBOK/about_me.htm" You want a page that's close, so you hold down CTRL key and click the down arrow to get: "www.0rdernet.com/VBOK/newsletter/index.htm" "www.0rdernet.com/VBOK/computers/computers.htm" "www.0rdernet.com/VBOK/thebat/index.htm" A little faster if you're working in the same domain. ______________________________________________________________________ 5. That's the news! ------ 14 year old charged with child porn felony for distributing a video of himself and a 12 year old girl having sex. ______________________________________________________________________ Well, that concludes this issue. Have fun. Leif Gregory Copyright (c) 1998 by Leif Gregory. All rights reserved. You may share this copy of the VBOK newsletter with others as long as it is reprinted/resent in it's entirety to include this copyright notice. If you've received this edition of the VBOK newsletter from a friend or colleague and wish to start receiving your own copies, then click the below link and send the generated e-mail message. Virtual Book Of Knowledge (VBOK) VBOK Editor VBOK Homepage Unsubscribe Back-Edition Titles