11-15-2002, 09:00 AM
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Executive Editor
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 29,160
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Hotmail & Spam
I often here this accusation bandied about - "Microsoft sells your Hotmail address to spammers, how else could we get so much spam?". To be honest, I pretty much believed it. I wanted proof, however, so I registered a new Hotmail account three weeks ago. I log in every few days, but the email address I used doesn't exist anywhere online.
The results? No spam at all.
I was quite surprised, because I thought even from brute-force username guessing the spammers would have found me. There are ways in which you open yourself up to spam vulnerability however, usually without knowing it. How? Keep reading.
Don't Confirm Email Address
You know how some spammers have a "click here to remove" link at the bottom? Be careful about clicking on that - some spammers will use a link like that to harvest legitimate email addresses, because if a link gets a click, that means the email got to someone on the other end, and that's valuable information to spammers. Ditto for "reply with REMOVE in the subject link - we'll take you off our mailing list, promise!". When you verify that your email address is active, spammers will in turn sell that valid email address to other spammers, and the amount of spam you get explodes. If it's a legitimate newsletter that you signed up for, un-subscribe - almost all newsletter owners will honour un-subscribe requests and often have automated systems for doing so.
Spam Trap Your Way to Happiness
What can you do to protect yourself from spam? The first thing is to register a "spam trap" email account. Hotmail, Yahoo Mail- anything free will do. When you sign up for ANYTHING online that asks for your email, whether it be a Web site or a trial software download, use this spam trap email address. Check it every week or so to keep it active, but don't use it for any real email correspondence (if you do, you'll be forced to check it more often to keep up with legitimate email). Only give out your real email address to other people - not to forms on Web sites.
If you own a domain and control the email aliasing on it, you can even get clever by using a specific email alias for each forum or program download - and when you start getting spam on that alias, shut it off of bounce it from your domain. This has the side benefit of allowing you to figure out who is selling your email address if you start to get spam to a specific address.
Spam Filtering Helps
The other thing you can do is get a spam filtering solution. I've tried out many of them on the market, but I found that every filtering solution I tried would catch the "good" email, put it into a folder, and I'd miss it. Or I'd spend more time going through the "suspect" folder than I would if I just deleted the spam in the first place. Spam-fighting tools that take up more time than the spam itself are useless to me. I found one application that I've been happy enough to keep however: Cloudmark SpamNet. It's a free application that plugs into Outlook (and only Outlook so far, which is a bummer), and it works quite well. I'm so confident in it that I have it set to mark my spam as read as soon as it arrives, move it to the Delete Items folder, and upon exit Outlook purges my deleted items. There are days that go by when I don't see a single spam message! Spamnet isn't perfect (lately I'm seeing more spam), but it's the best I've found and conceptually it's amazing:
"Imagine, a spam email message lands in your email, you click delete and it disappears from your Inbox - and the Inbox of your family, your friends and the entire world. Cloudmark SpamNet is a worldwide spam-fighting community that gives you spam-free email just for deleting the spam from your own Inbox. Join SpamNet now and contribute to the global fight against spam. Although spam seems to be invading everyone's email, only a relatively small number of spammers send out the billions of spam messages polluting the Internet. By reporting the spam you receive, you will contribute to the growing community of spam fighters dedicated to eradicating spam. Just like Napster allowed us to share a central list of our favorite music, Cloudmark Spamnet allows us to share a central list of spam. Individually this reported spam isn't very powerful, but the collective reports of millions of email users networked together blocks virtually all spam on the Internet."
Spam Can Be Minimized
Spamnet and a spam trap email account are two tools that have kept my spam under control for a while now. If you have an overwhelming amount of spam, you may want to consider doing the same. You can download Spamnet for free from their site. It's not a perfect solution to stopping spam, but it's a step in the right direction towards spam-free living.
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11-15-2002, 09:52 AM
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Philosopher
Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 513
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My own experience is very polarized. I use my Yahoo mail as one of my main daily accts, whereas I don't use my Hotmail at all except that it was required at one time or another for some Microsoft online services (I forget which).
But while I get a lot of valid emails coming to my Yahoo (I have something like 50-100MB space there), I receive a very manageable amount of spam to the Inbox (if I'm pressed to say, perhaps as much as a few a week at most), with the VAST bulk going correctly into the Bulk folder. And from checking time to time, the only valid emails that get misplaced in Bulk are Divx's newsletters. Don't get me wrong, a lot (a lot) of spam do come in (you should see the size of my Bulk folder each week), but I never see them.
OTOH, my Hotmail's Inbox is like 99.9999% spam (even with the spam filter set at its highest setting short of Exclusive). It's actually 100% spam except for the announcement emails that Hotmail itself sends to its members from time to time (since, again I never give out my Hotmail address at all anywhere else short of the required Microsoft sites).
So two things:
- I can't express how impressed I am with Yahoo's spam filtering technologies (can someone explain how it works?). But then it's like, it's such a stark contrast to how poorly Hotmail's filtering works.
- Outside of brute spam bots, I can only deduce that the rest of the spam I get to my Hotmail comes from registering on those MS sites I'd mentioned...
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11-15-2002, 09:54 AM
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Intellectual
Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 173
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I started a hotmail acct/passport in maybe january so I could use Money 2002. The username is a bit wonky, probably couldn't be guessed, and I've since used it to sign up for a couple forums, my credit card (AmEx), my Dish Network stuff, and a bunch of online retailers, all of which had some kind of privacy policy, and I have not recieved a SINGLE piece of spam.
Besides not having it be easily guessable (plain names/words) I think the secret is to
1) never put it in a position where it's published on the web. Even without a hyperlink attached to it.
2) every time you sign up for a new online forum/retailer/etc., read every single check-box you can find. Look out for words like "partners" and "offers". Once they give it away to a third party, who knows what their privacy policy is. On BB forums like this one, find the options menus, and go ahead and check-box the option to not have your e-mail address shown. If someone wants to contact you, they can send you a private message on this BBS, or ICQ or AIM or Y! you.
3) Unfortunately, you probably shouldn't give out this address to friends and/or family unless you really REALLY trust them to be spam-savvy. Sometimes they like to "send this article to a friend" or use it in one of those retarded "which one of your friends may have told us they have a crush on you" sites, or send mass-mail to you and 100 others some funny forward, only to have it eventually harvested by spammers.
So #3 pretty much means that this new spam-free account won't be your primary/personal account. But I follow these rules as best I can with my main address as well, and I've done pretty well.
One more thing (granted, if you've read this far, you won't mind more of my Spam-pinions) I will say that I do usually click the "click here to be removed" links because in my world of cautious optimism, your chances are BETTER that you'll be removed from a list than they are of being added to more. The spammer has already bothered to try these blanket-mails to random addresses, so why won't he do it again? I say, try to stop the propogation of your address to other spammers at every oppurtunity, so if 2 out of every 3 'removals' are legit, then instead of having 2 lists propogate your address to new spammers, you only have 1 (the malicious 'removal' guy)
Whew! Don't know why I spent so much time on that, but there ya have it.
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11-15-2002, 09:58 AM
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Ponderer
Join Date: Oct 2002
Posts: 62
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Re: Hotmail & Spam
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Originally Posted by Jason Dunn
I often here this accusation bandied about - "Microsoft sells your Hotmail address to spammers, how else could we get so much spam?". To be honest, I pretty much believed it. I wanted proof, however, so I registered a new Hotmail account three weeks ago. I log in every few days, but the email address I used doesn't exist anywhere online.
The results? No spam at all.
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give it time .. :?
i also have a hotmail address which doesn't exist anywhere online except in hotmail's databases. i average about three spam emails a day to it. i use msn messenger which tells me when i have new email & i've been wondering if it's possible to change the pop-up message to "you have two new spams in your inbox".
i still hold to the theory that they're selling the addresses.
they have a paid service now & i would bet the life of my dog that paid hotmail accounts receive none, or a very, very minimal amount of spam.
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11-15-2002, 10:52 AM
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Pupil
Join Date: Oct 2003
Posts: 45
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I've created 1 year ago an email address for my wife at hotmail so she can use messenger, and the only messages she has received until today are from hotmail... well she doesn't even know which is her hotmail address, so she doesn't use it anywhere... that should be the reason.
However, I believe that if one day one of her relatives sends an email thru MSN to her and a few other people, her address can begin to be spammed...
Regards,
Alberto Silva
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11-15-2002, 11:12 AM
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Pontificator
Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 1,213
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I set up a (free) Hotmail account about three months ago. I was very careful to make sure all the "spam me" boxes were not checked. The address is not listed in Hotmail's directory, nor have I ever used the account anywhere. I have not sent a single message from that account since setting it up. And now I get about three to six spams a week. :x
Giving MS the benefit of the doubt, I don't think this is from them selling my address. The first spam to that account arrived less than 24 hours after setting it up. I seriously doubt that they sold my address and it ended up on a spammer's list in less than a day. Instead, I think spammers try literally all combinations of addresses. Looking at the CC list of some spams to my primary e-mail address, there are messages to davea, daveb, davec, daved, and so on. (Mine would be the "daveb" variant.) I'll also get "daveb" at about thirty or so different domains, as well.
It's just a crap shoot for them. They send out millions of messages addresses to random combinations of usernames, and at least some of them are bound to be legit.
--Dave
__________________
Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary.
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11-15-2002, 11:16 AM
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Intellectual
Join Date: Sep 2002
Posts: 125
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I've apparently had the opposite experience to most of you.
A couple of months ago, I signed up with Hotmail to get an MS Passport so I could "activate" MS Reader so that silly popup wouldn't appear every time I started Reader on my iPAQ.
I never given the address out and never intended to use it for anything, and that's a good thing because it has received at least 10 spam a day since _the_very_same_day_ I created the new account.
A useless service if you ask me...
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11-15-2002, 12:24 PM
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Ponderer
Join Date: Jul 2002
Posts: 64
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Sneakemail.
Another good option is to use www.sneakemail.com
Here you can create "disposable" addresses that are forwarded by the service to your real e-mail., so you can know who is the one that sends the spam.
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11-15-2002, 01:59 PM
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Intellectual
Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 144
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Jason,
There has been a major change in spam on Hotmail. I use my hotmail account as a spam catcher (use it for newsgroups and "registering" on web sites). For a while I was receiving 100 emails a day into my inbox and another 100 into the junk mail folder.
Starting about two weeks ago this flood of spam suddenly dried up. Now I receive about 15 a day into my inbox and another 10 into the junk mail folder. I'm not sure if this signals the hotmail is taking action against spammers or that spam in general is down, but it is certainly a good thing.
L.B.
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11-15-2002, 02:05 PM
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Thinker
Join Date: Jul 2002
Posts: 416
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I get the feeling that Microsoft is trying to sell their 'premiere' email services so they've taken off the protection from their regular free hotmail services.
Just seemed to get 10 times worse all of a sudden.
Edward
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