Fighting Spam for Dummies

Read a
sample chapter
(may load
slowly)

By John R. Levine, Margaret Levine Young and Ray Everett-Church.
January 2004, 222 cute little pages, US$14.99. C$21.99, £9.99, ISBN 0-7645-5965-6.

Spam -- unsolicited bulk and commercial e-mail -- may be killing e-mail. Spam is making causing people to cancel their Internet accounts (or at least stop reading their e-mail), because e-mail has become just plain tooan unpleasant and too big a waste of time. E-mail has also become unreliable, because spam filters sometimes accidentally throw away good messages with the spam. Spam wastes thousands of hours of our time, as we scan skim subject lines and press the Delete key, trying to guess which messages aren't even worth opening. Luckily, we e-mail users can do something about spam, both on both the small scale and on the grand scale. On the small scale, we can use spam filters so that we don't have to seeto junk most of the spam that's addressed to us, and we can report spam to network managers. On the grand scale, we can lobby for effective anti-spam laws to make it possible for us to sue the rip-off artists who don't see anything wrong with paying nothing to fill our inboxes that we pay for with their advertising. You've probably figured out that we have some strong feelings about spam! You probably have strong feelings too. This book is talks about how you can get rid of most or all of the spam in your mailbox. We also cover where spam comes from, how it came about, whom to report it to, and whether anti-spam laws would be effective. We can assure you that after reading this book, you'll know how to have an almost spam-free Internet experience.

Table of Contents

Part I: The World of Spam.
1: How Spam Works--and Drives You Crazy!
2: How Spammers Get Your Address
3: There Oughtta Be a Law Against Spam
4: Talk to the Hand 'Cuz the Spammer Don't Care

Part II: Filtering Spam Out of Your Inbox
5; Mailbox Filtering in Your E-Mail Program
6: Filtering Spam in Outlook Express and Outlook
7: Filtering Spam in Netscape and Mozilla Mail
8: Filtering Spam in Eudora
9: Filtering Spam in AOL and AOL Communicator
10: Filtering Spam in Hotmail, MSN, and Yahoo! Mail

Part III: Spam-Filtering Programs and Services
11: A Round-Up of Desktop Antispam Programs
12: Antispam Services for Just Plain Folks
13: Server-Side Spam Filtering for Network Administrators

Part IV: The Part of Tens.
14: Ten Spam Scams
15: Ten Internet Annoyances and How to Get Rid of Them