Set your e-mail sights on a spam-free 2009

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Wausau attorney Sarah L. Ruffi, of Ruffi Law Offices S.C., took a four-day break from technology over Thanksgiving weekend. On Monday morning, upon firing up her computer, a mere 40 e-mails were awaiting. It took only a few minutes to respond to those that needed a response, and to file or delete those that did not.

The best part of all is that she wasn’t wading through e-mails with bogus stock tips and discounted Viagra — and that’s because she’s a devotee of SpamEater Pro 4, an anti-spam solution that seeks out and “eats” spam before she downloads it to her inbox.

I guess someone, somewhere, must respond to spam in the desired way, or no one would send it. By the same token, I know no one who would ever admit to finding spam to be anything but a nuisance.

Everyone’s favorite source of information, Wikipedia, says there are popular, but false, etymologies of the word “spam.” Even if they are bogus, they are amusing. The first is that “spamming” is what happens when one dumps a can of SPAM luncheon meat into a fan blade. The second and third are acronyms, “s*** posing as mail,” and “stupid pointless annoying messages.”

There are a number of free spam filters available on the Web, such as POPfile, eXpurgate and Spamihilator.

Although Ruffi didn’t mention any one of the freebies by name, she says, of the ones she tried, none did the job to her satisfaction. So about a year in a half ago, she instructed her paralegal to find something better, and SpamEater Pro 4 is what she came up with, for $25 per month. It’s worth every penny, Ruffi says.

Like her, the developer of SpamEater is also a small-business owner. His is High Mountain Software in Bailey, Colo. It gives her some satisfaction to be supporting him, versus one of the software giants.

The way it works is, you tell SpamEater Pro where your ISP’s mail server is, and your login information. Then SpamEater connects with the server, either on a timed basis or manually; it’s your choice. It checks the messages on the server for spam. It can be deleted from the server, bounced back to the sender, or archived locally and deleted from the server. Another option, for those who truly loathe spam, is to cut-and-paste to SpamCop Web forms for complaint generation to the sender’s and advertiser’s ISPs.

Other Spam-Control Strategies

At the risk of stating the obvious, revealing your e-mail address sparingly is a wise idea, albeit not so great from a marketing perspective.

I’ve got two e-mail addresses: one that I give out professionally and to family and friends only, and one that I use when prompted to enter an e-mail address when buying something online or visiting a Web site.

I get very little spam using the first e-mail address, and it’s even published in the State Bar’s directory and on the Wisconsin Law Journal Web site.

The second gets a fair amount of junk. For a second address, maybe you could use a free Web-based address, such as a Hotmail or Yahoo. Or, try one of the temporary e-mail address Web sites, such as GuerillaMail.com (available as an iGoogle Gadget) or Mailinator.com.

In addition, I recently attempted to use a message filter as an “auto reply — I’m on vacation.” I didn’t have great success with it, and asked my techy husband for help. I was immediately chastised; apparently using these filters is a thoughtful courtesy (unless you’re on a list serve — my apologies to the Practice 411 list serve members!), but they’re also an excellent way to alert spammers that they’ve found a valid e-mail address.

May 2009 be a prosperous and spam-free year for us all!

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