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Quill Services Ltd. - Business Technology Consulting

(August 25 2003) Spam Self-Defense

What would happen to your business if the Post Office randomly destroyed one out of ten of your outgoing letters… customer invoices, bill payments, insurance renewals, and birthday cards, all indiscriminately decimated?

How do you know this isn't happening right now to your emails?

Many articles have been written about stopping unwanted email (spam) from arriving in (or remaining) your inbox. Unsolicited bulk email is an epidemic - approximately 2/3 of all emails are spam.

Email users are resorting to ever more powerful weapons to delete spam: Server-based filtering, blocklists, external filtering services, subject-based and content based filtering on the receiving computer, (either “learning” or rules-based), all in addition to the time-honoured "JHD" (just hit delete) method of scanning through the titles of email and repetitively hitting the Delete key.

What about you, as a sender of email?

The problem with all of these methods, and especially JHD, is the "False Positive", the good email that gets thrown out with the bad.

All filters are fallible:

An email filtering system is considered successful if it has fewer than 2% false positives. But for someone who receives 1000 emails a week, that may mean 20 important emails that never reach the recipient. Better filtering systems put the rejected mail in a quarantine area for the recipient to review before deleting. Unfortunately, reviewing 900 emails to find a few good ones is not a time saver, and most people give up and just delete. So some of your important emails are going to go direct to your recipient’s trash.

The Problem for you as a sender:

The goal of every spammer is to create an email that will entice you to open it; either by declaring openly in the subject what purports to offer "Get Free XXX Movies" or by deceiving you into thinking it is a legitimate email.

Many of the deceptive subjects are intentionally ambiguous, to fit the maximum number of recipients, for example "Hi!" "You didn’t return my email" "Re: our meeting" "About last Friday…" "Your Inquiry" "Overdue Balance" "Mail delivery failed" "Application Declined" "Your money" "My new email address". Many spammers forge innocent sounding names in the From address to make it look like someone you might know.

If you send an email that unwittingly fits the "profile" of a spam message, it might get caught in the recipient’s filters or be deleted before reading. This means, for better or worse, you must think ahead and modify your message for maximum clarity. Following are some guidelines.

Attachments:

Avoid sending attachments with emails if at all possible, especially to first-time correspondents. An attachment is an automatic alert for a possible virus.

Beware of sending attachments if you are using an email program such as Outlook, Incredimail or MS Word. These programs can send HTML-formatted emails with text formatting and cute background graphics. The graphics get sent as an attachment to the email.

And what about that fancy HTML formatting? Some recipients do not enable HTML in their mail readers (for security reasons), so your message will come out a hard to read mess of code.

My advice is to turn off HTML formatting and send only plain-text emails. Your readership will be higher, and the size of your emails will be much smaller, which you may not appreciate until you are on the receiving end of an inbox that is over-capacity and bounces your mail.

Subject Line:

You MUST have a Subject. Nothing gets deleted faster than a blank subject from an unknown sender, unless it also has an attachment.

Your subject should state clearly what the email is about, in the first 20 - 30 characters.

"Re:Your last email" does not cut it.

"Help", "Question", "Re: re: re: re:" and "Look at this!" are worse.

"Confirming meeting w/ Steve 3PM Aug 3" is better.

Your recipient is going to scan through the Subjects in the inbox and decide within one to two seconds whether to hit the delete key on your message. Help them make the right decision.

Avoid spam key words such as:

Free, Get, $, !, SPAM, ADV, You, Your Bills, Norton, Credit, Save, 000, Now Only, Check, Year, Make, Sale, Money, DVD, Just, Lose, Software, Earn Bargain, Meds, As Seen, Loans, Interest, Lowest, Generic, Herbal, Investment, Reduce, Up to, Inkjet, Toner, Free Instant, Cartridge, Ripped, Insurance, Domain, Drugs, Prescription, Rx, Increase size, Pharmacy, Drug store, Work from home, Golf, Smallest, Largest, Weight, Warranty, Business Proposition, Health, Men’s, Open, Download, Buy, Take, Respond, OEM, Certificate, Diploma, XXX, Teen

and any drug names or sexual euphemisms. Does this limit what you can title your legitimate emails? Of course, but that’s the point. The spammers try to look legitimate, and you need to NOT look like a spammer.

Limit the use of punctuation, (especially ! and ?), do not use ALL CAPS, and do not change the priority of your email either to High or to Bulk.

Sender’s Address: How do I know it’s you?

If you are a business, you MUST use a Sending address that reflects the business name. A personal name as the From: address is not appropriate.

Most email programs allow you to set up multiple Sending “Accounts” and customize the appearance of the From line.
"Steve G." is bad,
"Steve at Acme Products" is better,
"Acme Products, S.Garriton, Accounts" is best, and will sort properly by company name as well.

Avoid generic names like "Sales", "Support" and "Customer Service" unless they also include the company name. Don’t use a name that starts or ends with numbers.

Domains:

If at all possible, use a corporate domain name that is owned by your company, and never use free or web-based email accounts for business correspondence. Why? Because a domain name can be checked for ownership, while a free email account is completely anonymous and can be forged by anyone. Some firms refuse to respond to correspondence from @yahoo.com @hotmail.com @netscape.com and other free addresses - under the assumption that it is not worth dealing with somone who is hiding their identity, or with a company doesn't have a legitimate name.

acmeproducts@yahoo.com is bad; sgarriton@acmeproducts.com is better.

There is another subtle message in a generic mail address: if your company can’t afford $35 for its own domain name, how stable is your company?

Your domain name needs to look professional and clearly identify the company: avoid the use of numerical abbreviations and alphabetic shorthand (bargainz4u.com, click2save.com), avoid key spamming domain words such as Free, Save, Opt, Mail, Bargain, Biz, List, Blast and avoid any potential drug or sexual euphemisms.

Make your domain as easy as possible for outsiders to guess, and don’t abbreviate your name into oblivion. Apic.com would be bad for Acme Products International Corp.; Acmeproducts.com would be better.

Stay with a .com name, or a country specific name like .ca if your business is not international.

Avoid the .biz top-level domain like the plague – it has been overrun by spammers and fly-by-nighters. I personally can’t see the point of vanity top-level country domains like .tv and .bz – unless your business really is based in Tuvalu or Belize.

Whitelists:

Whitelist systems try to limit incoming mail to senders that the recipient has pre-approved (whitelisted). This is utterly unworkable in a business environment where you must be able to receive communications from new customers.

If you are sending mail to a recipient with some types of whitelist system, you may receive an automated email back challenging you to prove who you are, before the original email will be sent to the recipient. There is not much you can do other than comply, or contact your recipient by phone and ask them to provide an email address that doesn’t make you jump through hoops. There is a real problem with these systems- if your email is set up so that incoming mail goes to a different person, or if your email system in turn blocks the automated message, you may never know your mail didn’t get through.

Blacklists:

A lot of spam filtering is being done based on blacklists; mail is blocked if it's origin is on one or more lists of the IP addresses of servers that are known to send large amounts of spam.

How does this affect you? Because the blacklisting is done at the level of the IP address of the sending service provider or host, all clients of that host, legitimate and otherwise, will be blocked from sending mail to the recipients protected by the blacklist.

This means if your service provider or mail hosting company permits even one spammer to operate from their servers, you will be tarred with the same brush when your host’s IP address is blacklisted.

The best defense is to investigate the mail abuse records BEFORE you enter into a contract with the service provider, and query them on their spam policies. You can look up the name of the host on the Net Abuse Sightings news group

http://groups.google.ca/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&group=news.admin.net-abuse.email

Check the IP address at http://www.abuse.net/lookup.phtml

and check out whether a host is currently blacklisted at

http://www.mail-abuse.org/cgi-bin/lookup
http://www.spews.org/
http://www.monkeys.com/anti-spam/filtering/lists.html
http://spamcop.net/bl.shtml

If your service provider is blacklisted, or does not terminate spammers immediately, vote with your feet and choose a host with solid anti-spam policies.

Lastly, if your company is based in Korea, China, Russia, Nigeria or Brazil, do everything you can to locate your Web and email services in North America, and use only .com domain names instead of .kr, .cn, .ru .ng and.br. Significant portions of the Internet are blocked to traffic from these five nations that have become havens for spam senders.

To sum up:

If your email quacks like a duck, it’ll get shot, so your outgoing emails need to be well-composed and as un-like spam as you can make them. Paying more attention to composition, sending addresses and domains will also result in greater recognition and readability of your communications.

Trevor Inkpen
President, Quill Services Ltd.
945 Alston St.
Victoria BC Canada V9A 3S5

PS. In the past 30 days, I have received over 11,000 spam emails, and 1,424 "keepers", for a ratio of about 88% spam. If you are "Gabrielle" who emailed me last week with a message entitled "Please reply", call me at (250) 382-6227, because I threw your email away…

Call Trevor Inkpen at Quill Services Ltd. for business technology consulting. (250) 382-6227
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