A Life Without Spam

Below is an article I wrote years ago on how to fight spam, which I've updated with new tricks. The best trick I've learned so far is using Boxtrapper to create whitelists (it's the last trick at the bottom). For example, before installing my own whitelist with Boxtrapper, I had 38 emails yesterday morning, and 95% of them were spam. This morning, I had 2 emails, and neither of them was spam.

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"Imagine if you could bum one cigarette off of each person in the world?" Will said. "You could have a billion cigarettes!"

"True," I said, "but what if each person in the world bummed one cigarette off of you?”

“Yeah," he said with a frown, "that would suck.”

Spammers are ‘bumming cigarettes’ off of all of us. For them, it’s “just one more cigarette”, but for us, they're the 10,000th person asking for a cigarette.

I’ve made all the mistakes that got me spammed. So I did the only reasonable thing I could have done—I changed my email. And for four years, I lived a blissful spam-free existence. And yet, one day, I started getting spam... on an email I wasn’t willing to change. What now?

Many battles wage throughout history, e.g., cryptography vs. cryptanalysis, freedom vs. security, and the battle against spam falls within that context: business rights vs. consumer rights. Though some spam does come from legitimate businesses selling their products, it's the years of door-to-door salesmen, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, and unrelenting telemarketers than have forced our governments to approve legislation to keep people away from our home. Emails should be no different. So why do we still succumb to a daily barrage of worthless emails? We shouldn't succumb, of course, but the power of email lies in its global reach... which also means national legislation can't stop international spammers. Microsoft says 97% of all email is spam, so if you can't kill the beast, how do you contain it?

HOW TO STOP SPAM

A Quick Glossary

• ISP Internet Service Provider, the company whom you pay every month to have access to the web, i.e., sbcglobal.net, aol.com, earthlink.net, though not necessarily the company in charge of your email if you use manage a domain.
  
• IP Address An IP number is a unique number for a server, always listed as four paired numbers separated by three periods, i.e., 64.116.1.244

The best cure of all is prevention—the basic tricks listed here can be applied by anyone, but the advanced tricks are mainly for webmasters or for those willing to spend sometime talking with their ISP.

Basic Tricks: SETTING UP EMAIL

1. Create a new personal email. Tell only friends and family about it. Though obviously drastic, this one trick will eliminate all your spam immediately. Tell everyone not to bandy about your email with impunity.
   
2. Use a long and/or complicated email address. Even new emails will eventually get spammed because spam programs systematically guess until they find a valid email. So use a long email address, with more than one word, with numbers and/or underscores to throw them off the trail.
   
3. Choose a reputable ISP, like SBCGLOBAL.NET, to retrieve your email. Cheaper ISPs are often lax about their anti-spam policies, meaning they may not use spam filters and also complaints to these ISPs will likely go unheeded. Most ISPs, like AOL, give you both net access and manage your email, However, they don’t have to be the same, so be clear who manages your email.
   
4. Create a web-based email (Yahoo or Gmail, not Hotmail). If you already have a personal email, then use this web-based email for promotions and “proof of working email” when creating usernames and passwords for new websites. The big companies are pretty good about weeding out spam for you.

Basic Tricks: RECEIVING SPAM

1. Don’t even open spam. Do you recognize the sender? Does the subject line start with “ADV:”? Is there an attachment with an extension of “.pif”, “.scr”, or “.vbs” (these attachments are usually viruses)? HTML spam use an image link that, when the HTML emails are opened, track which images are viewed and that in turn tells spammers which emails are “live”. In some email programs, you can actually disable the “auto load images”, which solves the spam issue, but not for viruses: on PCs, if an email attachment has a “.vbs” extention (Visual Basic Script), you can infect your computer simply by opening the email.
   
2. Never reply to spam. Some spammers are hoping you reply because that tells them your email is “live” and then they can sell your email to email marketing companies. Virus-writers will always put a bogus email in the “Reply-to” field (which can be different from the “From” field), so your irate reply will either go nowhere or befall some innocent bystander.
   
3. Never try to unsubscribe from spam. Same as above.
   
4. Never buy anything through spam. One paying customer out of 10,000 bulk emails is enough to pay for 20,000 more spam emails. Don’t do it.

Basic Tricks: EMAIL USAGE

1. Don’t put your personal email in your browser’s email section. If you use cookies, and most people have to if they buy anything on the web, an email address typed into the browser’s preferences (Explorer—> Preferences —> Email) could be grabbed by a spammer’s cookie. Not to pass up an opportunity to amuse myself, I put “look@mybutt_on.tv” as my email.
   
2. Never post on Newsgroups with your home email, only with your Yahoo! Mail account. Spammers use “spiders” to collect emails on the net and newsgroups. Post on Newsgroups with phony text in the email itself: jake@DELETETHIShotmail.com. Because spiders search for the @ symbol, nother common shorthand is jakeAThotmailDOTcom.
   
3. Uncheck those “newsletter” checkboxes. When signing up for something online, look carefully for the small check boxes at the bottom—these are for promotional “newsletters” that you will almost certainly not want. Don’t complain to ISPs about these emails—if you left these boxes checked, you asked for those emails!
   
4. Ask others to BCC: your email on mass forwarded emails. A friend forwards you a joke—or a chain letter or the infamous Disney/Microsoft hoax “asking” for emails—and 100 other people, then you do the same, and so on; each time the email is forwarded, all the previously forwarded emails are included in the body of the email by default. The moment that email falls into the hands of a spammer, every email on the list will get spam, forever. Forwarded jokes aren’t inherently evil, but including someone’s email without their permission is evil. You wouldn't hand over your phonebook to thousands of strangers, would you? If someone must forward you jokes and chain letters, politely ask them to start putting your email in the BCC: field (“Blind Carbon Copy”)—you’ll still receive their jokes but no one will have any trace of your email. Likewise, as a courtesy to others, don’t forward jokes without 1) removing all emails in the body of the email and 2) putting everyone’s emails in the BCC: field; the only TO: recipient to the email should be you.
   
5. Google your own email. A lot of emails are already out there for spammers to find; if your email is in the public domain, track it down by doing a search for it at www.google.com. Then, contact the webmaster for the webpage where your email is listed and ask to have it removed. Finally, contact Google and do the same. Otherwise, you’ll just have to accept that your email will be bombarded with spam forever.

Advanced Tricks: FILTERS, ALIASES & WHITELISTS

1. Use Spam Assassin. This app is loaded on your ISP's server and identifies spam before it even gets into your in box. Depending on how vigilant you want to be, you can even enable "Auto delete spam", but that might accidentally delete real emails.
   
2. Use your ISP’s Spam Filters. Good ISPs have good spam filters, so ask your ISP how to use their filters. Though this approach is somewhat effective if you can’t or won’t change your email address, it still only blocks spam coming from one IP address and it doesn’t stop spammers from emailing you from other IP addresses or selling your email to other spammers.
   
3. Use a local spam filter. My Mac's email client is Eudora, so I installed Spam Sieve which screens all my incoming mail and puts all spam into its own folder. Most of the time, I never even know I've even received any spam there.
   
4. Use multiple aliases and discontinue the offending aliases. If you're using your own domain, you can create emails like spammy@rosspruden.com, temp@rosspruden.com, and bbcnews@rosspruden.com, which can be forwarded to one email address because they are an “alias”. At the first sign of trouble, any of these aliases can be instantly discontinued.
   
5. Use a Whitelist & Blacklist. Some ISPs offer killer applications like Boxtrapper, which lets you list all friendly emails on a "whitelist" so that only those emails are forwarded to your local email client's in box. As you meet new friends, you simply add their emails to your whitelist (sometimes it's as simple as sending them an email, which Boxtrapper interprets as implicit approval to communicate with that email) and none of the other junk email gets through.

+10.8 (∆ +1)

Anyone see a pattern?

+9.8 (∆ -2.2)

At the top of every month, my wife goes on a "long week" where she works 12 hour days for seven days in a row. It's a rough week for us both, but the trade off is good weeks for the rest of the month. Sometimes her hours are 7AM–7PM and sometimes they're 3PM-11PM (yes, I know that's not 12 hours, but these hours still happen during a long week which means I have to get Zoë up in the morning and put her down at night, which is a handful.)

Last week, when I realized my wife was doing her 3PM–11PM shift, my first thought was, "Oh man, I'm going to lose some weight." One of the advantages of her shift is that I have total control over my own dinners. Normally, I'd be cooking fish every night and she would gladly eat it, but with the pregnancy, any cooking smell makes her nauseated. Yet, while she's not at home, I can have Ahi Tuna tonight, Swordfish tomorrow night, and Salmon the night after that—all hail Trader Joe's.

Having just come back from vacation and missing my gym workouts, I committed to seven days of gym outings while still eating under my calorie budget. Currently, I weigh much less than I did in January so my daily calorie budget has dropped from 1,996 to 1,873. If I were to consistently eat less than 1,873 calories—regardless of any expended calories during my aerobic workouts—I'm certain I would lose a substantial amount of weight. (However, I'll soon run out of wiggle room on calories—The American College of Sports Medicine recommends men eat no less than 1,800 calories daily and women eat no less than 1,200 calories daily.)

I'm finally less than 10 pounds away from my target weight, which is a huge boost to my morale. The simple math of eating less and working out is working exactly as I anticipated.

Next milepost: +8 (my lowest recorded weight since November 2005)

+12 (∆ -3.6)

Three areas where I typically binge: vacation, road trips, and film shoots. And in the last two weeks, I had a road trip, vacation, another road trip... and a film shoot. After all that sated temptation, I was extremely reluctant to step on the scale.

My lowest weight before going on vacation was +12, so I was afraid I'd have jumped back to +16 or higher after the film shoot wrapped. Fortunately, my weight stayed down. Perhaps my months of improved eating habits kicked in; I'm consciously aware I'm eating more fruit than I used to, which always helps. I didn't want to punish myself by not indulging in ice cream or fatty things. I simply had less of them than I used to.

I must admit—I did take my scale on vacation just to remind me not to go hog wild. Obviously, it worked.

This month, I'm aiming for below +10. Because that would be freakin' awesome.

Umlaut. Trema. Interpunct.

Today I was reading this article by Malcolm Gladwell, published in The New Yorker, in which I saw the word reexamine typed out like reëxamine. Among English speakers, perhaps because there are so few words in English with the "two dot" accent, this accent is commonly misunderstood as a (German) umlaut:

The word umlaut is the name of a type of sound shift in spoken language (phonological umlaut) and of the diacritic mark used to represent it orthographically.... The phonological phenomenon of umlaut occurs in English (man ~ men; full ~ fill; goose ~ geese)... but English orthography does not write the sound shift using the umlaut diacritic. Instead, a different letter is used. Link.

So, if English were German, instead if writing man and men, we'd put an umlaut over the a—män—to represent the different vowel sound, men.

However, in the above example, the accent in reëxamine is not an umlaut, but a diaeresis, or trema. (As I understand it, the trema is typographically smaller than the umlaut, although I have yet to find a source to verify that since its origin is Scandinavian and English ASCII unfairly lumps umlauts and tremas into one keystroke.) The trema is different from an umlaut in that it signifies that the accented vowel should be pronounced separately from the letter preceding it, e.g., naïve, or Emily Brontë. This is why my daughter's name is not spelled Zoey, but Zoë. They are pronounced the same, but without a trema, Zoe would rhyme with toe, not Joey.

Anyway, when I saw "reëxamine" in a mainstream article, I immediately wondered if it were correct, or simply a house style mandated by a haughty Fifth Avenue editor. A Google search returned this wonderful gem, wherein I learned about the interpunct.

Reëxamine
22 Jun 2006, 12:44 PM | Archaic Punctuation

I saw this spelling of reexamine in the New Yorker this year. I want to say to the editor, for real, dude? You are spelling reexamine with an umlaut? It's like: Oh. My. Gawd.

Isn't this just an example of pretentiousness gone waaaay too far?

The New Yorker actually mandates this usage in their style guide, along with such wonders as "The New Yorker mandates that authors must coöperate to reëducate our readership." As well as zoölogy, coördination, and so forth. They also point out that the umlaut is no umlaut in this usage but is rather a diaeresis.

The correct punctuation mark to use when breaking up things in this way is the interpunct, or punt volat. It's used in Catalan to distinguish between the standard doble ela 'll' and the ela geminada l·l. This is exactly the same purpose,— to prevent letters from coalescing into a phoneme;— such as these common cases of double letters that could, possibly, be interpreted as a long vowel sound, if read by a space alien who had never read the New Yorker, and was not yet very familiar with English: “Ree-cha-mee-nay, what is that?”

The interpunct reads and flows better, it is not a distraction, people are used to it, and it does not bring the sentence to a screeching halt as it desperately calls attention to itself. Use it well. On the Mac, opt-shift-9 summons the interpunct.

"We, the punctuative literate, ask that the board re·examine its mandate that authors should have to co·operate in re·educating their readership." Link.

I prefer the interpunct to the trema, although I disagree that the interpunct is "correct" English usage. To my knowledge, it's still only used in Catalan for the meaning he posits here. So the author's argument doesn't hold, in my view—even an interpunct would "bring the sentence to a screeching halt as it desperately calls attention to itself."

And besides, no matter how much I love trash-collecting robots from the 28th century, there's not a damned chance in hell my daughter's name will ever be Zo·e.

+15.6 (∆ -0.4)

Yesterday, I sort of binged. I had a huge carb load—for lunch, a white flower tortilla with refried beans, cheese, and multigrain pilaf and, for dinner, Chesseburger Mac & Cheese Hamburger Helper. Usually, I would never have Hamburger Helper but my wife had a hankering, so what's a guy to do? Besides, my "eating less" isn't regulated by what I eat, just by how much I eat. I still squeaked under my daily calorie quota, but barely.

Last night and this morning, though, I felt awful. Though I'd had enough sleep, I still felt as if I'd been out drinking the night before. White flour, I thought. Could I be having a white flour hangover? White flour affects my wife to such a degree that if she eats a huge plate of white flour pasta, she has been known to fall asleep at the table. Maybe the same was happening to me?

In any event, the massive carb load got me worried, if only because my weight tends to spike about two days after I have a huge amount of food. So today, as an antidote to my bingeing yesterday, I kicked ass at the gym (524 calories!!! Woo hoo!) and had a very very light lunch.

But it's the lunch itself that really gave me pause:

• Honey Wheat Bread, 2 slices—180 calories
  
• Salame, 4 slices—100 calories
  
• Light Mayo, 1 tablespoon—35 calories
  
• Yellow Mustard, 2 teaspoons—7 calories
  
• Tomato slices, 1/3 of a whole—12 calories
  
• Red Leaf Lettuce, 1/2 cup—2 calories
  
• Red Bell Pepper, 1 cup—29 calories
  
• Soy milk, 1 serving—80 calories

Total calories: 424

I look at that kind of meal, and I think, Holy shit. Seriously? What have I turned into?? Two months ago, that same sandwich would have had twice as much meat, thick slices of cheddar, a bowl of soup on the side, and chips, nearly double the current calorie load. However, not only is the above meal completely nutritious, I found it totally filling, too. The bell pepper is my crunchy substitute for chips, and turns out to be far more flavorful. I know my eating habits have irrevocably changed when I'm making these kinds of conscious choices... and enjoying them. Two months ago, if you'd have told me I'd be full on only 424 calories of lunch, without chips, I flat out would not have believed you.

Piracy is a Hydra

I went to a workshop on copyright the other night. It was extremely informative, but even the lawyer giving the lecture acknowledged that something major needed to be done to address the current situation of massive pirated downloads. Having worked as counsel for Tower Records, she represented them in that famous lawsuit against Napster because Napster had been dumb enough to specify in their business plan, "We're going to put companies like Tower Records out of business." Well, Napster went under, but then so did Tower Records. Ironically, Napster was reincarnated under a subscription-based model.

One attendee mentioned The Pirate Bay, which is an anti-copyright organization run out of Stockholm, Sweden. The Pirate Bay hosts a server indexing all BitTorrent files currently available, which means that if you go to their web site, you can find an "index" link to any film, movie, or song they have. When you use BitTorrent on that index link, it finds all the people who have a small fraction of that song on their computers and assembles all those parts into a complete file for you to watch or listen to. This is called, "hyperdistribution". As an American, by using BitTorrent, you have almost certainly infringed the copyright of the artists and their producers... but that doesn't seem to stop anyone from doing it. The Pirate Bay has gotten a lot of heat from the MPAA and record companies, and their offices were even raided by Swedish police in 2006. After that raid, however, The Pirate Bay was up and running again only three days later.

A few months ago, I discovered a site that goes a step farther—Watch-Movies.net. You don't even need BitTorrent to use this site. All you do is go to their site, type in the movie you want to see, and find the file that works the best for you. Invariably, these files are made from illegal camcorders in movie theatres, so you can see films still in general release. The quality is not always high, but if you're willing to sacrifice quality, then you can see practically any movie you want, for free, as long as you have access to the internet. Even though watch-movies.net stopped working quite suddenly (due to someone complaining, no doubt), Watch-movies-links.net Watch-Movies-online.tv Watchmovieslinksonline.com was started up not long thereafter.

A Whois lookup on Watch-movies-links.net returned this:

Registrant:
Name: Private Protection Co.LTD
Organization: Private Protection Co.LTD.
Address: NO.1111 Chaoyang Road, Beijing
City: Beijing
Province/state: BJ
Country: CN
Postal Code: 100000

Administrative Contact:
Name: Private Protection Co.LTD. Zhuhai Branch
Organization: Private Protection Co.LTD.
Address: NO.1 Meihua Road
City: Zhuhai
Province/state: GD
Country: CN
Postal Code: 519000
Email: ad9ad10c6983b7ffe00bb2a6fac1fdf4@domain-private.com

Dispute Contact:
Name: Todaynic.com,Inc.
Organization: Todaynic.com,Inc.
Address: 6B XIHAI Building, No.221 Renmin E Road, Xiangzhou District,
City: Zhuhai
Province/state: GD
Country: CN
Postal Code: 519000
Phone: +86.756-2281763
Nameserver Information:
ns3.01isp.com
ns4.01isp.net

As expected, Watch-Movies-Links.net is based in China, one of the largest violators of copyright. In doing research for my movie business plan, I learned China permits only 20 foreign movies to be shown annually in their country. If the tables were turned, and the best movies were always made in China, and the American government said I could only see 20 foreign movies per year—of which only a fraction were Chinese—I'm sure that I, too, would be a pirate without any ethical reservations. Since China is still under the yolk of communism, an ideology which divorces the individual from private property, I'm unsurprised when I hear Chinese citizens (proudly) call their country, "The nation of fake."

The ability for companies to brazenly violate copyright reminds me of the Hydra from Ancient Greek mythology. Hercules' Second Labor was to kill the Hydra, but "upon cutting off each of its heads, he found two grew back, an expression of the hopelessness of such a struggle". In this case, the MPAA, music companies, and the world's police are Hercules, and the Hydra is both the Pirates and the consumers who use BitTorrent. Try as they might, authorities can't seem to kill hyperdistribution. Shut down Napster? Here's BitTorrent. Shut down The Pirate Bay? They're up three days later. Shut down Watch-Movies.net? They switch domains. Sue consumers? You get a consumer backlash.

Why does piracy continue to flourish despite the continued assault from authorities? Because piracy at its core isn't a legal or technical matter, and thus cannot be solved with legal or technical tools. Piracy is in its essence a social problem only catalyzed by an unenforceable (and thus unrealistic) legal code and an astonishingly efficient delivery system. Rampant piracy is really just a symptom of users who want to consume content, and who aren't particularly interested in the hassle of paying for it. Sure, if it's easier to find content and pay for it than to download it over BitTorrent, they'll pay (thus the success of iTunes). But here's the bitter pill nobody wants to swallow: if a user goes out of their way to watch a pirated copy, they probably weren't a paying customer to begin with. Far from being a curse, users who watch pirated shows and movies and listen to pirated songs possess one unique benefit—a user who watches or listens to a pirated copy might like it enough to buy it on CD or DVD and/or recommend it to others... which is impossible if they never even watched or listened to it.

Sites like Hulu.com and ABC.com with its own media viewer show how the entertainment industry is evolving to come to viewers. Instead of not showing content online and "forcing" viewers into downloading episodes illegally, they're creating user-friendly parameters to make it easier for people to get the content they want, whenever they want it. The theory goes something like, if they're going to dally about with a mistress, at least we want to control who and where that mistress is... because we can make money off of that.

Lawrence Lessig makes an excellent point about copyright. The way the law is currently set up makes it too hard for providers to let users share, remix or use content. In an internet digital culture where sharing is the norm, copyright law is so restrictive that it's now stifling creativity. That's why I've become a fan of the Lessig's Creative Commons License.

My friend Nik said it best when talking about the pervasiveness of spam: "As long as you have a backwater country that doesn't crack down on spammers, you're always going to have spam. The only way to really fight spam is to manage it." Maybe one day, every country in the world will indeed have a police authority able and willing to protect the rights of every content producer around the world. I fear, though, that such a day will be long after my children have already grown up... and during that time, our culture will have since become accustomed to violating copyright as the norm.