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Spam, Junk Mail, and CMCWhat is spam?Ever get an E-Mail from some company you have never heard of? Ever get something in your email you would expect to find in a sleazy book store, or worse yet, your child gets it? In a nutshell, this is Spam; something delivered to your CMC account, that you did not ask for, do not want, and really could live without. Where does spam come from?Spam can come from any number of places on the Internet. If, for instance, you have ever posted to a news group, your address and your post is moved to tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of servers all over Earth. That way your post can be seen by millions of people. However, there are some companies who have software to "Harvest" your name and Email address from your posts to News. They capture hundred of thousands of names and Email addresses per hour from News groups, create a mail list CDROM, then sell it to whoever has the money to buy it! Other companies have software to "spider" your WWW page. What a spider does is to walk through each and every www page your site links to. So if you have 10 pages, and they are linked, the spider will hit every one of them. If your name appears on any WWW page and you have an E-Mail address attached to it, the spiders will find it eventually. The spider then writes all of the E-Mail addresses it found to a file, the spammer moves that address list to his mail program, and then starts sending out thousands of spam items to thousands of unsuspecting folks like you. When they are finished, they can (and do), sell the address list they created to another spammer who does the same thing all over again! Why can't CMC block all spam?We get really careful when it comes to your Mail! Our initial setup is to allow anything which meets the technical specifications for mail to be delivered to your mail box. This will allow a correctly formatted mail item to be delivered to your mailbox at CMC, and hence into your PC, no matter who sent it. CMC has no real way to tell if a mail item is spam or not without reading your mail something you don't want to happen, and something we don't want to happen. So our policy is "hands off" with regards to this, and it will remain so. Will I ever be able to get rid of all spam to my mailbox?Nope! No matter what major service you signup for, they will only be able to reduce the spam count into your Mailbox. If you have E-Mail, and you are reasonably active on the Net, then you will get spam. How can I reduce the spam I get?CMC can offer some suggestions and a bit of help using something called Mail filters. First the suggestions:
How can CMC help you reduce spam?Your System Administrator (Brian) has crafted some clever traps for spammers. We have a set of filters looking for various addresses. Without going into a long technical discussion of how and why it works, the result is that it will reduce your spam count considerably from the spammers collecting names via Newsgroups. Brian has put together a set of mail filters which we have been using for many years now. To make a long story short: There are some folks on the Internet that really, really hate spam. They provide a listing service for just this sort of thing. So we tie our mail filters into them. That way, if a new spammer pops up, (they are like a disease, a new one every day), they get listed, and we know about it, so the program adds them to the spam filters. This results in a changing list. If a new spammer starts sending spam out, they get included in the filter list, and in most cases, you never see the spam in your mailbox. If you are still getting bothered by spammers, we have a WWW page where you can request the "Heavy Duty" spam filters. What these do is to actually start filtering your mail. We will NOT turn them on for you, as this would effect your mail, and as I said earlier, we don't like doing anything with your mail. However, we have made it really simple for you to reduce the amount of spam you get You just go to a our special NO SPAM page, and press the "I hate spammers" button. It will verify it is you, then add you to the list of folks who would like the spam count reduced. If you should decide you don't like the filters at some point, just go to the same page, and press the "I like spammers" button. That will turn on and off the filters. The filters are really well constructed. That does not mean you will never see spam again, but it will reduce the spam you get. We hope you enjoy the use of the filters, and please feel free to offer suggestions to us. Does this extra service cost anything?Nope, free, nada, nothing! As a responsible ISP (Internet Service Provider), we feel it is your right to have at least some control over what enters your mailbox. Given that we have no control over who mails you, and what they send you, the best we can do is to offer you our internal filters. Where do I go to turn the filters off and on? |
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