Fighting Spam for Dummies (Paperback)

by John R. Levine (Author), Margaret Levine Young (Author), Ray Everett-Church (Author) "Ten years ago, spam hardly existed, and now it wastes the time of millions of people every day-including you..." (more)
Key Phrases: Spam Bully, Mozilla Mail, Communicator Mail (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Unsolicited commercial email--spam--has become the most frequent complaint among users of the Internet. Its blaring subject lines and gaudy content--repetitive at best and frequently offensive--have made it much harder to make productive use of computers. Fighting Spam for Dummies presents some techniques for keeping your email address off spammers' mailing lists and, when that fails, keeping junk mail out of your primary inbox with filters and other utilities. As a last resort, the book (which, oddly, has three co-authors of its 200 small pages) shows you how to adjust your email program so it doesn't automatically show pictures and is less likely to spread viruses.

There's a fair bit of interesting material in this book, a lot of which has to do with the tricks spammers use to conceal their identities. You'll find detailed instructions on how to convert the header lines of a garbage message--complete with obfuscated URLs and fake IP addresses--into the real origin of the message. Of course, there's not much more to do once you've figured out that the message originated in Taiwan or Russia, but that's not the fault of the authors. Elsewhere in this slender handbook, you'll find click-by-click instructions for erecting filters and making other worthwhile configuration changes in Eudora, Netscape and Mozilla Mail, several versions of Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, and several Webmail sites. --David Wall

Topics covered: Where spam comes from and what you can do about it. Instructions for configuring email clients focus on software for Microsoft Windows.

Review
“…an informative, fun and easy-to-read book which does not patronise the reader and will not confuse.” (Virus Bulletin, April 2005)

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Product Details

• Paperback: 236 pages
• Publisher: For Dummies (January 30, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0764559656
• ISBN-13: 978-0764559655
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #646,330 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Limited advice, mostly for end users, July 1, 2004

By	W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars one to pay attention to, January 30, 2005

By	Charles Oriez (Colorado) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.