Kill Your Spam Buddy

A "spam buddy" is a person who's email address constantly show's up in spam along side yours in unsolicited messages.

Let's say your main email is bradmajors27@mydomain.com. A piece of spam might look like the following:

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Good times!...
Date: Thu, 7 Dec 2006 16:54:49 +0500
From: Chang Byers 
To: bradmajors27@mydomain.com, bradmajon41@mydomain.com,
 bradmajer33@mydomain.com, brad_maj2020@mydomain.com

C*jhubby 18yo Twins Doing B@d things with cel3ry.  See Our site: fsldja.fdksjss.com

Four score and sixty-six years ago, computers tried to eat cheesecake.

Lets say you always seem to share the "to line" with bradmajon41@mydomain.com. That makes him your spam buddy. Surprisingly, he can be your buddy in deed.

His email address happens to fall right next to your email address in various major spam databases. There's a good chance you will continue to get emails with similar recipient lists for years to come.

Odds are, spam is your only shared interest with Mr. Majon. So, why not block all email in which his address shows up?

Due to the large number of email lists, you may find that you have a number of different sets of spam buddies which pop up in different threads of spam. It may make sense to block them all.

Most popular email applications like Outlook, Outlook Express or Thunderbird support this kind of basic filtering. Alternately, it may be easier to setup the filtering in your spam blocker application. SpamButcher supports this, as do most other similar spam filter programs.

Blocking your spam buddies is nearly zero-risk. The odds of their email addresses showing up in a message you want are extremely low. My best guesstimate is that most users could use this technique to kill 10% to about 25% of their spam on top of any other techniques they are using.

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