The Design & Publishing Center _|_ News _|_ spam.html Handling Spam ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ by Paul Corr A Review of Spam Options Overview Why Do I Get Spam? Prevention Removing Yourself Email Client Filtering Email Filtering Services Filtering Using Programming Techniques Reporting Spam SpamCop Service Overview What Type of User Are You? What Approach to Take? Filtering Options Quick Setup Overview Using the Setup Wizard Initial Experience with SpamCop Filter Preferences Setup What About AOL? Using the Service Example of Held Email Conclusion A Review of Spam Options Overview Spam is another name for unwanted commercial email, or UCE. Some of the most numerous examples seem to promote mortgate rate providers, herbal viagra, voyeurism, work at home schemes, Internet detective services, and millions of email addresses (to send your own spam.) Before I took action, one-quarter of my daily mail was spam (about 25 messages), and three-quarters on the weekends. The technical publisher O'Reilly and Associates has a book, "Stopping Spam: Stamping Out Unwanted Email and News Postings." A complete description with sample chapter and table of contents is available at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/spam/ Here is an excerpt from that sample chapter, "What's Spam and What's the Problem?" Spam may be cheap to send, but bulk email and newsgroup postings come at a high price to recipients of the messages and to the Internet through which they travel. It's because of this price that "simply clicking Delete" isn't a good solution to the spam problem... It may take a spammer just five or ten minutes to program his computer to send a million messages over the course of a weekend. Now it's true that each of these messages can be deleted with just a click of the mouse, which takes only three or four seconds: a few seconds to determine that the message is in fact spam plus a second to click Delete. But those seconds add up quickly: one million people clicking Delete corresponds to roughly a month of wasted human activity. Or put another way, if you get six spam messages a day, you're wasting two hours each year deleting spam. It also notes there is a cost to the ISP, traffic generated, etc. Expect to see more spam... a lot more spam. A good portion of the latest crop I'm seeing is from, or run through, servers in Russia or China. Why Do I Get Spam? You can get yourself in a spam database if you have a link to your email address on a Web page, or if you use the popular formmail.pl script for Web form processing on your Web site. Spam generators use email 'harvesting' robots to crawl across Web sites looking for g'mailto' links, or the formmail.pl Web form's 'recipient' hidden field. You might also get added to an email address database by posting your email address to a news group or an email discussion list that archives its messages online, registering for a members-only Web gsite, or purchasing from an online shopping site where that site sells its member list. You should check to see if shopping or gmembership Web sites have online privacy statements. One option to avoid questionable memberships is to use temporary email address services, as described below. Once you start receiving spam, you have several options. You can simply delete it. Even if the message has 'to remove yourself...' instructions, don't reply as most spam generators hide their origins using special software and often the 'Reply-to' address is dead or bogus. Or, if you do reply, it will only verify that the email address is good, and worthy of sale to other spam generators. Often gthere is a note that the message complies with Senate bill xxx. It is still spam. You didn't sign up for it. If you find yourself drowning gin spam, you can explore other options. Several online services for spam prevention or handling are described below, including a long exploration of the SpamCop filtering service. Prevention Don't include a linked email address on your own (or any) Web site, if possible. There is a Javascript for constructing an email link at http://javascript.internet.com/ that I have used in the past. It breaks up the link using Javascript's 'document.write' method to gconfuse the email harvesting robots. Include the plain text of your email address (not linked) in a 'NOSCRIPT' tag pair, for those with Javascript disabled, if you like. Also, you might simply post the plain text of your email address rather than linking it. Here are some other prevention options when you are shopping or registering on Web sites: ExpireIt.Com or SneakEmail.Com (http://www.expireit.com; http://www.sneakemail.com) - Use a temporary email address when registering for an online service. Once you receive and respond to the confirmation email, you can expire the address used. Web Mail Services - Web-based email services, like hotmail.com, excite.com, yahoo.com, etc., will allow you to create another email account. You can use this account on lists, etc. to protect your main account. You can then log in to the account weekly and check the boxes for the spam messages in the list and hit 'delete marked messages'. These accounts usually have an upper limit on space of about 2 MB, after which messages will bounce back to the sender. Be aware, that email from your account on these services may be filtered to trash as much spam uses accounts on these services as reply-to addresses. Trust-e Logo Sites - If you are going to do business on the Web, verify that the site has a privacy statement on how they collect and use information you provide. Even better, look for the Trust-e logo (http://www.truste.com/). That service allows its logo to be used on sites that meet standards of privacy. Removing Yourself You can't. It's that simple. Occasionally, I see spam with footers describing they are in compliance with Senate Bill xxx, or by clicking or replying with 'remove' as the subject, you will be removed, etc. On the SpamCop.net site there are discussion groups for gspam warriors, new users, etc. I received one spam with a footer that said to go to removeyou.com and use the global removal service to get gyour email address out of spam databases. A message was posted by 'staff' at the 'removeyou' service with no return email address. My feeling, and those on the discussion list, is if they can't stand gbehind their service enough to sign their name, or include a legitimate email address, it's a questionable resource. There is no Trust-e logo on the site, of course. One SpamCop list member did a search on the contacts for the domain, etc. and found anomalies. Another poster said the domain is run by a spammer. After a long fight, there is now a law in Washington state that requires commercial email to have legitimate return addresses and other valid identifying information. See Adam Engst's TidBITs article: http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06458 for the story of their involvement and success. You shouldn't have to remove yourself from something you didn't choose. Email Client Filtering This is usually the next option after simply deleting unwanted email. Currently, I use Eudora to filter all expected email from lists, software vendor announcements, friends, colleagues, etc. to individual mail folders, to mailing list or other topic folders. In gthis way, all unwanted email will appear alone in my 'In' box for easy scanning and deletion. Most email clients have features to create filters that move mail automatically to folders. For information on filtering in your email client, see "Filtering Messages" in Eudora Help. In Netscape Communicator, choose 'Help' under the 'Help' menu and then 'Using Email'. Scroll down to 'Organizing Your Mail' to read about filters. In Outlook Express Help, see "Organizing Mail." In addition to its rules for organizing email, Outlook Express has a Junk Mail Filter. Here is an excerpt from its description: The Junk Mail Filter uses known criteria to classify messages you receive as junk mail. For example, if you receive a message that includes signs of a forged e-mail address in the From box, the Junk Mail Filter classifies the message as junk. In the past, I was able to download and import a blacklist into Eudora for filtering of problem senders. This worked for awhile but spam-generating software now creates random, bogus addresses or otherwise mangles various email header fields. Filtering by subject is also difficult as the spam software continually modifies that field. The good blacklist sites are used by the email filtering services described below. Email Filtering Services In addition to filtering email in your email client application (Eudora, Express, Netscape...), you can use a filtering service. POBox.Com - this is a redirection account service with spam tagging. It's been around a long time. You can get long-term accounts here with the advantage of having one consistent email address, even if you change providers. If you do change, simply log in to your POBox.Com account and change the 'redirect to' address. Mail sent through POBox.Com arrives with a 'Spam' keyword in the subject line, including a score out of a possible ten. Here's an example: [spam score 7.34/10.0 -pobox] Subject: Get One Thousand Per Sale! $0 Down! No Bull!!! A subject line like this will assist filtering in your email client. Note, you cannot use a redirecting address to subscribe to an email discussion list as you will probably not be able to confirm your address. SpamCop.Net - has a paid service where you can have your email filtered. You can then decide to either report the spam or release the emails to your account. All management is via the service's Web site. This is heavy-duty spam control. It takes some time to gunderstand the configuration and options. More on the SpamCop service later. Filtering Using Programming Techniques While this won't be an option for many users, I'm including it for completeness. It is possible to use script and command-line techniques to filter your email, if you have programming experience, and access to a command-line shell for your account. There is an article on user-level email filtering, via Perl programming techniques, by Simon Cozens in Issue #18 (Vol. 5, No. 2, Summer 2000) of "The Perl Journal." (http://www.tpj.com/) There is a series of three articles by Mark Jason Dominus on "My Life With Spam", available at http://perl.plover.com/lp/Spam.html. Mark is a Perl guru who writes well and explains things thoroughly and concisely. Here's a brief excerpt from the intro in the first article: The email spam was really starting to bother me towards the end of 1996, when I was getting several junk messages each week. (How quaint that seems now!) I tried to figure out what to do about the spam. Some of the plans worked out well. Some were instant failures. Some were failures but it took me years to decide that they didn't work---those are the most interesting ones. Briefly, in the articles Mark uses Perl to create various methods for filtering email. There is also a short, but useful, article in the August 2001 issue of Web Techniques magazine (http://www.web-techniques.com/) called "Save Your Site From Spambots" with techniques for administrators of Apache Web servers. The article includes a couple handy techniques for Web page authors also, including the Javascipt technique mentioned above. Reporting Spam There are services online where you can become involved and report spam after you receive it: SpamWatcher.Com (http://www.spamwatcher.com/) - Appears to be a free site. You paste in spam and it finds the host that sent it. It's useful to paste a spam email with full headers into the reporting form and read the results to learn the basics of checking email gheaders. It's a quick intro to the dirty work. See the "My Life With Spam" series of articles listed above for extensive header review techiniques. SpamCop.Net - has a free service where you can register for a free account to report spam. The service also has a paid member filtering service. Reporting spam to these services is done by viewing a spam message in your email client (Outlook Express, Eudora, command-line text email clients like pine... :-), displaying full email headers, copying the full email headers and message, and pasting it into the Web reporting form and submitting it. Note: copying Web mail service headers and gmessage probably will not work. (i.e., Excite, Yahoo, WebBox.Com, etc.) When you report spam, you are becoming a volunteer spam warrior. It has value in that it alerts system adminstrators of the activity and possible server vulnerabilities. SpamCop Service Overview SpamCop is a Web service that will provide a free account for reporting spam, or your can sign up for a paid member account for filtering spam. With the free account, you sign up and get an account where you can report spam for addition to the service's spam database. The service will send a report to the originating ISP, and any host advertised in the mail, alerting sysadmins about this activity. Some server systems have 'open mail relays'. Basically, this is where someone from outside can use a mail server to send email from anywhere to anywhere. They do not have to have an account on that system. The system administrator may be unaware that spam generators are using their servers. Be aware that more servers are getting connected to the Internet but talent in server administration is keeping up more slowly. The service report will alert administrators, possibly also indicating they may have users violating acceptable use policies. My ISP received a note from SpamCop about a version of a script I was using on a Web site I maintain. That script could be exploited as an open mail relay. I received a notice and warning from my ISP, and after some back and forth for clarification, the ISP replaced the script with a secure script with compatible functionality that uses Perl CGI module. By the way, the SpamCop service also has an 'Estimate Usage' section that tells you how much you have used and at what rate. After three weeks of use, here is my report: Usage Estimates On Jun 17 10:00:24 2001 -0400 you had 25.0M bytes. Now, you have 19.7M bytes. Average Usage Rate: 3.06 bytes/second... Monthly Charge: 7.9M bytes/month $3.97/month Yearly Charge: 96.5M bytes/year $48.24/year This mini-report includes estimated cost for the SpamCop service. I can 'add fuel' to my account at any time. Ninety-six megabytes of spam per year... SpamCop describes itself as "strong medicine and as such, you should take some time to familiarize yourself with its features, options and documentation." Please note that I am a member and user of the service. There is a lot of documentation on the SpamCop Web site that spans several pages. It often is not intuitive what options to select, and what the consequences will be. I assembled the documentation below for myself and a colleague. What Type of User Are You? Single Email Account - If you can't get your provider to set up a 2nd secret email account as suggested on the setup pages, you can use the SpamCop service Web site to manually poll your email account, using its filtering features. Multiple Email Accounts - You can use the service to filter some accounts and designate one for receiving reports from the service and replies from ISPs receiving SpamCop reports. Simple Email User - If you aren't on any email discussion lists, you can submit your preferences keeping the defaults. Read the instructions carefully though to best understand the service. Member of Mailing List - If you are on an email discussion list, especially one that has the 'From:' header listing the individual poster, not the list, you will want to change the default under Sender Release. See below. Advanced User - There are a number of options for the advanced user. Check the documentation on the SpamCop.net Web site. What Approach to Take? There are two approaches to take in using the SpamCop service. You can activate the service using the defaults where users sending you email will need to respond to a SpamCop reply email that contains a 'release URL.' This alerts them that you are using SpamCop and indicaties they must release the email to you, a one-time activity. If you use this approach, you can also import your email address book to your personal 'white list' on the service (i.e., good senders) to prevent those users from ever seeing an alert. Alternately, you can change the settings for more anonymous service activity where you control releasing mail messages. In the latter scenario, you can change one default setting and wait for email to gcome in and be released. This is the recommended option for email discussion or other mailing list users. Again, you can add your gaddress book entries to your personal SpamCop email database to immediately build your "white list" of acceptable addresses. Note: you will have to login at least weekly to avoid losing new, good mail from users not in your 'white list'. Filtering Options A paid SpamCop member account allows you to filter your email in addition to the using the spam reporting service. If you want to send gall your email through SpamCop, you have several options: you can set up a second, 'secret' email account with your provider. This email addess will get the SpamCop reports. All mail will be filtered through the service. you can use an account from a 2nd provider to receive the reports, and all email from the main account will be filtered. you can use the SpamCop Web site to manual poll your accounts to retrieve and filter mail on a regular basis. you can connect to the SC POP3 servers using your email client to retrieve your email These options are covered in the SpamCop FAQ under 'Filtering Email'. Quick Setup Overview Now that we know the possible approaches, let's look at how to configure an account to filter email. Normally, when you use a new application, selecting the default settings is usually sufficient. Any email filtering program you use gshould not be a burden for non-participants. Once the SpamCop service is activated, a user sending me mail will receive a reply from SpamCop and that user will need to release their email to me. There is no way around this for that user. For this reason, I'm recommending a new SpamCop member change the default setting to manually release email, rather than sending a message to the sender to do so, at least for an initial learning period. I'm also recommending adding your list of email addresses to your SpamCop sender database at setup. Here is an overview of steps for configuration, with more detailed explanations following: 1) Go to the SpamCop.net Web site (http://www.spamcop.net/) and sign up for a paid member account to get the email filtering services. 2) Log In: after confirming your account via email, activating the account, log in to the members area - http://members.spamcop.net/ - to begin configuration. 3) Browse the available documentation linked from the main members page. Every page link has descriptive text and there is an extensive FAQ and various discussion forums available from the "Help and Feedback" link on every page. Take some time here. 4) Select Options/Preferences. On the main members page, select 'Options: Change your preferences' under 'Member Functions'. On the latter page, select 'General Options', which describes itself: Many very important options - all users should read and set this up carefully! Set your email address, full name, handling of spam report replies and how agressive spam protection should be. Selecting the link will display the 'Filter Preferences' screen. 5) Change the default setting under 'Sender Release' to "Disable - Only you may release held email (recommended for mailing list recipients.)" Keep the other defaults and "Save Preferences." (You can change these settings later, if desired.) 6) Next, select the "Preferences" link under the page banner to see a menu preferences page. Use the Setup Wizard to indicate the email address where SpamCop reports will be sent. More information included below. 7) From the "Preferences" menu page, select "Edit Senders Database." On that page, scroll to select the "Import Senders" link. Paste a list of addresses from your email client into the field. Verify that g"Authorize Senders" is showing in the pop-down menu, and submit. This will add these senders to your personal 'white list'. (I used a text editor to do some clean-up on the email address book list of addresses generated by Netscape, and Eudora. One address per line or addresses separated by commas, etc. should work.) 8) Add email accounts to monitor by selecting the "Poll Servers (POP setup)" link on the Preferences page. Again, you want to keep one account free for SpamCop reports, or you can use your SpamCop account to get the reports, as I do. The latter is done in the Setup Wizard, available from the Preference page. Using the Setup Wizard In the Setup Wizard, there are three screens: 1) In the first screen, you enter the name that will appear on reports. 2) In the second screen, you select between "Forward email to another account" (the default) or "Receive email on SpamCop POP server." With the former, you will want to enter the 'secret' or non-filtered email second account address for receiving SpamCop reports. In the latter option, you will have to connect to the SpamCop server to retrieve reports. This would be one option for users with a single email account. 3) The third screen will vary. If you choose to forward report email to a second account, you will be prompted for that address. If electing to receive report mail on the SpamCop server, a confirmation screen will appear: Please pop your confirmation mail now: Server: spamcop.net Username: joeuser Sending confirmation to joeuser@spamcop.net Confirmation email has been sent. Please check your mail to complete confirmation. You must retreive this confirmation email and respond to it for your account to be activated. Return to main preferences menu 4) Check mail for that second account or connect to the SpamCop mail server, as appropriate, and answer the confirmation email by clicking the link or copying and pasting the other generated email address. Initial Experience with SpamCop After activation, my mail traffic went to almost nothing. I logged into the SpamCop members Web site and found I had several "Held emails". For each, I can delete or release and email by checking that option and selecting the appropriate submit button. I can also view an email to see if it is spam or merely an announcement from a software vendor, etc. There is also a "Report" button to begin a spam report. This action's report page also gives you the option to view the message one more time in a separate window to verify if it is spam. I keep the suggested defaults checked on which server administers will get the report. When you use the SpamCop member filtering service to report a spam email, that address goes into your personal 'black list' in addition gto the service report. Similarly, when you release an email, its address goes into your personal 'white list' of good addresses. I have multiple email accounts. I'm on several mailing lists. When I first enabled SpamCop, I would manually release messages that arrived. Some were from mailing list where the 'From:' header was gfrom the list but the 'Reply-to:' header listed the individual posting. Releasing any message from the list, enabled the list to send messages uninterrupted. i.e., no SpamCop 'release URL' notice was included after that. One list had the posting individual's email address in 'From:' header field, and there was no 'Reply-to:' field. So, replies go to the user, not the list. The list address only appears in the 'To:' field, which is often missing, mangled, or bogus in spam messages. The SpamCop service ignores this field. In this scenario, I would need to gapprove every message from every sender until my SpamCop 'white list' contained their address. This activity annoyed the list users for a gday and a half as I initially accepted the default filter settings. I unsubscribed from the list until I fully understood the configuration. I learned a change from the default in 'Sender Release' is recommended for those on mailing lists. Filter Preferences Setup The Quick Setup Overview above has the basics for setting up an account and filtering options. Included here are more details with descriptive text accompanying the filter settings. From the Preferences page, select "Filter Options" to change your settings. Preferences: Filter Preferences: Smart Filtering: [x] Filter - Filter new senders based on their Internet provider [default] Preferences: Filter Preferences: Sender release: [ ] Enable - Send release URL to unknown senders [default] [x] Disable - Only you may release held email (recommended for mailing list recipients) From the documentation instructions for 'Sender release': When email is received from a new, legitimate sender, it is possible that SpamCop will block it. By returning a "release key" to each new sender, you give these people an easy way to override the block and send the email on it's way. This release key also serves to warn the sender that they belong to a network known for spamming. If you do not want senders to know you are using SpamCop, or you prefer to do this "dirty work" for them, you can disable this auto-reply feature. You can then review each held email and decide for yourself which ones should be released. If you decide to send mailing lists through SpamCop, it is recommended that you disable sending of release replies. Although SpamCop tries to prevent it, these replies may wind up on the list and bug other list subscribers. Preferences: Filter Preferences: HTML email sterilization [ ] Intact - Do not modify email sent in HTML format [x] Sterilize - Mangle HTML mime types to prevent hostile code [default] Most popular email software now includes rendering of HTML inside of email. This is often undesirable. First, unless you have some other protection, HTML email can be used by the sender to secretly generate a confirmation that the email was received, confirm your email address and even associate your email address with a cookie which will be returned when you surf the web. Second, HTML email can be just plain annoying. It is often hard to read and uses extra bandwidth to download images from remote servers. By making small changes to the mime-types in an HTML email, SpamCop can prevent HTML email from rendering on your email software, thus preventing HTML associated problems. Most HTML email also contains a text version of the email, so this feature will not usually prevent normal reading of email, however sometimes you may encounter HTML-only email which will appear as HTML source code - still readable, but very messy. What About AOL? AOL's mail servers have non-standard configuration and therefore may require some changes from normal SpamCop settings. From the FAQ: Most users have one or more email addresses that are all sent through SpamCop initially; then the email is routed to a separate, secret email address that only SpamCop knows. Please note: The email to be filtered must be forwarded automatically to your new @spamcop.net email address - or - retrieved from the open internet by connecting to your normal POP3 email server. Most ISPs allow this, but not AOL. If an AOL user isn't specifically in your 'white list' of senders, the email will be held. I'm guessing this means an email from an AOL account will never receive a release email reply. According to the help screens, AOL's servers use non-standard mail server configuration. You will have to manually release a message from a new AOL sender. SpamCop FAQ: Filtering email: How do I set up the filters?: Q: How do I set up SpamCop normally? ...Warning: SpamCop is strong medicine. It filters many ISPs by default. For example, email from any AOL user is held unless you have specified otherwise. This is draconian, but it is also what makes SpamCop so effective. Using the Service You use the SpamCop service by logging in to the members area and reviewing your 'Held Email'. From that screen, you can simply delete the email, release email from new senders, submit a spam report on an email, or view the message. HTML email messages will be converted to text. The SpamCop 'View message' option allows you to verify a message is spam before sending a report. Verifying helps keep the quality of the service's reports to server administrators reliable and higher quality. Messages sent from users in your 'white list', or released by you in the service's 'Held Email' page will arrive in your regular email session in your client. One disadvantage of using SpamCop to filter your email is the need to do email management through their Web site. If you are on a slow modem connection, this could be problematic. Normally, using an email client, you can pickup mail and simply read and process off-line. While the site design is simple and the pages load quickly, when you submit a report it may be some time before the result page appears, gdepending on server traffic. In this article, I'm making the assumption that after setup you are interested, as I am, in assisting the effort by becoming a spam warrior by reporting spam you receive. You can also follow all the instructions above for configuration but only mark messages for 'deletion' or 'sending' on the 'Held email' page. You can leave the spam messages listed there to age. The FAQ seems to indicate they will be deleted after a week. Familiarize yourself with how to release blocked email too. When SpamCop traps email, it does not notify you. You must check the SpamCop site once a week at least to be sure you are not losing anything important - and to report the trapped spam if you wish. If you depend on email, you should check far more often - at least initially. And from the SpamCop Forum: > My question: how long will any given message > stay on that page? 7 days... The responding poster recommends disabling SpamCop's filtering for long periods where you are unable to check the site for held email (vacation, etc.) See: "Preferences:Filter Options:Smart Filtering:" and select "Block None" to disable filtering, then submit the changes using the "Save Preferences" button at page bottom. Note that this again illustrates that you should visit the members site and the 'Held Email' report page at least weekly. Example of Held Email When you log in to the SpamCop members Web site periodically, you will see notes similar to "Welcome, You have 19.5M bytes available. Held Email: You have 3 blocked messages." Here is an example of the held email listing: --- [#####] srsingh77@vector.ch (GET EXPOSED ON TEH NET W/MASS E-MAILING-GET 1 FREE MILLION) held Jul 9 00:41:03 2001 -0400 (Single IP spam source) [ ]Mark for deletion [ ]Mark for sending [X]Report [ ]View [#####] merchant_acc101@yahoo.com (Accept Credit Cards! Increase Sales! 23912) held Jul 9 00:37:47 2001 -0400 (Single IP spam source) [ ]Mark for deletion [ ]Mark for sending [X]Report [ ]View [#####] wuyer76ery8i@email.com (Read this ASAP! ) held Jul 8 21:17:14 2001 -0400 (Single IP spam source) [ ]Mark for deletion [ ]Mark for sending [X]Report [ ]View [#####] pacman_115@hof.baynet.de (^^WE GOT THRE BEST INTERENT ADVERTISING--BULK E-MAIL-1 FREE MILLION) gheld Jul 9 07:05:13 2001 -0400 (Single IP spam source) [ ]Mark for deletion [ ]Mark for sending [X]Report [ ]View --- The '#####' is the individual report number. The first email came from Germany, the second and third from Sprint dial-up accounts. The last came from a commercial domain. Note the misspellings in the Subject lines making it difficult to filter. This is intentional. As near as I can tell, 'Mark for sending' will add an address to your 'white list', 'Report' will add the address to your 'black list', 'View' and 'Delete' have no impact on how mail from that address is handled by the service. Conclusion My goal in writing this article/tipsheet was to assist a colleague in Colorado. She is also getting far too much spam in her in-box. It's difficult to do support long-distance and so I sat down at the keyboard to assemble a thorough review, recommendations, and instructions. Spam is here to stay. It's possible the law passed in Washington State (referenced in the TidBITs article link above) may be replicated in other states but the Internet is global, every ISP would need to have strong standards on hosting and sending spam, etc. The bottom line is email today takes much time to read and answer and spam adds substantially to the load. I personally use prevention techniques, filter my email in Eudora, use a redirecting lifetime email address, and use the SpamCop spam reporting and filtering service. There are a number of Web sites to learn about the spam problem and several options you can take to lessen the load on your incoming email. Best of luck in your effort. --- Paul Corr, (c) 2001 Back to: The Design & Publishing Center _|_ News _|_ spam.html