Blame the (Spam) Victim

A recent Infoweek article blames end-users for their spam woes. The way to stop spam mail is by modifying their behavior.

It says that the problem is that users click links in spam other than the 'Unsubscribe' link. This indicates to the spammer that your mail address is valid.

There are a couple problems with this assessment. For one, spammers just love it when users click unsubscribe. Spammers use it to validate your email address just the as if you clicked on any other link. Many spam senders will pull you from one of their lists after you unsubscribe, only to place you on a different spam message list.

The second problem is that spammers often don't need you to click anything. Most users have their mail client setup to display images. For that matter, many email clients don't even offer users the choice. When an email client renders an HTML message with images, it usually requests those images from a remote server.

Spammers can easily use the log data to determine which addresses are worth bombing again.

So, who's to blame for spam? The answer is simple: spammers. Users can definitely engage in safer or riskier behavior. However, in time I suspect all email accounts will develop a significant spam problem.

To fight spam, try deploying an anti-spam tool on your PC. Newer solutions can eliminate the large majority of unwanted messages. SpamButcher is a powerful spam filter program and is available for free trial from this website.

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