NinerNet hosts email. The one thing that this guarantees us is to receive complaints about spam. Unfortunately, we’re not a monolith like Google, so we need to reply to these. Try sending an email to support@gmail.com and see what you get. Silence.
So the point of this post is to try and help people understand why they get spam at all. This has nothing to do with your email hosting provider. Well, I can certainly guarantee that NinerNet is not selling your email address(es) to the spammers, otherwise we’d be rich! But we don’t need to sell your email address. If you create the email address your-common-first-name@your-domain-that-is-publicly-known.tld, bingo, the spammers have your email address. What about that support address above? That’s what’s called an RFC 2142 address. RFC 2142 (“Mailbox Names for Common Services, Roles and Functions”) outlines a list of email addresses that are supposed to exist on every domain, and one of them is support@. They are:
- abuse@
- ftp@
- hostmaster@
- info@
- list@
- list-request@
- marketing@
- news@
- noc@
- postmaster@
- sales@
- security@
- support@
- usenet@
- uucp@
- webmaster@
- www@
You probably have one or more of those addresses on your domain. Congratulations! You’ve just painted a target on your back, or maybe seventeen of them to be precise.
Other ways spammers get your email address:
- Websites: Don’t post your email address on the Web! Even on your own website. There are crawlers/spiders automatically collecting those addresses every minute of every day. If you post your email address on your own website, it will receive spam within days, maybe even hours!
- Unscrupulous suppliers: This has always been a bugbear. Of course, if your supplier happens to have millions of customers, it would be tempting for them to sell your email addresses. Some disguise this as “sharing your information with trusted partner organisations”. Of course, their definition of “sharing” has a dollar figure attached to it, dollars they will never “share” with you.
- Crackers: Ever had a virus on your computer? Your email address and the email addresses of all of your correspondents are probably not the only thing you’ve handed over.
- Friends: You know that idiot friend or relative of yours that sends out joke emails with hundreds of email address in the “to” and “cc” fields? Yup, thanks Aunty Betty / Uncle Bobby.
- Forwarding: This is one the things that has driven me crazy since the 20th century! It’s bad enough that your friend/relative has sent you the world’s funniest email joke in the history of humanity, but they copied it to a thousand of their closest friends and relatives by putting their email addresses — including yours! — in the “to” and/or “cc” fields so that everyone can see them! And then, to show how ignorant some of their friends and relatives are, some of them forwarded the same email with all of those addresses still exposed in the body of the message. Those email addresses are all then exposed to whatever malware comes along on any of the hundred or thousands of computers on which those emails are stored. But it’s not just ignorant friends and relatives that do this; I’ve seen supposedly professional IT people do this in professional, business emails!
- Hacked databases: Related to the “unscrupulous suppliers” point above is the fact that the databases of said suppliers are hacked all the time.
- WHOIS: If you’ve registered a domain, the domain registry likely has your email address in a publicly-accessible database called the WHOIS (“‘Who is’ the owner of this domain?”). Thankfully, when the GDPR was implemented in the European Union in 2018, the biggest registries in the world — the ones that run the gTLDs (generic top-level domains) — were forced to take their heads out of their nether regions and stop publishing that information. But sadly, some ccTLD registries still have their heads planted firmly where they’ve always been (can anyone say dot-zm?) and they still make this information freely available to spammers scraping the WHOIS, despite their feeble disclaimers.
- Viruses and other malware: If one of your contacts’ machines or devices are compromised by a virus, one of the purposes of that virus is probably to spam you, or send copies of the virus to you.
- Subscriptions: If someone is trying to get your email address for their newsletter, maybe they also want it to sell it.
- E-cards: Awww, it’s so lovely to send your valentine (or wannabe valentine) a valentine “e-card” … or Christmas card, or birthday card, or …. You probably didn’t ask for their consent first though, so you’ve essentially just screwed (and not in the way you or your valentine want to on Valentine’s Day!) your valentine’s email address for the rest of his/her life, or the life of that email address.
- Signing up for stuff: Whether it’s a free report or white paper or signing up for a class at a local community centre, you lose control of your email address the moment you give it out to anyone. Some websites exist simply for the purpose of collecting email addresses in this way, a cute, shiny bauble for your email address. Are you really going to read their hundreds of pages of terms and conditions to realise how your email address (and you) are going to be abused? Didn’t think so.
- Phishing: Phishing emails essentially just try to trick you into doing something you normally wouldn’t do. Of course, they already have your email address from any of the methods listed here, but they want more than just your email address, and perhaps what they want are the email addresses of all of your contacts. Often they can get these if somehow you give them to them (LinkedIn) or they can get if you give them the password to your email account where you might have them saved.
- Plug-ins and apps: Be very careful of plug-ins and apps that may be copying all of your contacts and sending them to whoever is controlling the app or plug-in. Be especially careful of apps and various social media websites (such as LinkedIn) that helpfully offer to send invitations to your contacts! We mention LinkedIn in this regard especially, for these three reasons:
- Use of e-mail accounts of members for spam sending,
- Perkins lawsuit (related to the above), and
- Moving emails to LinkedIn servers.
- Brute force: Besides the technique mentioned where spammers send to a list of common names on all domains, they can simply send to a@example.com, b@example.com and so on, and then start again at aa@example.com, ab@example.com and so on. The terms “brute force” and “dictionary attack” apply here.
- Buying it: The other side of any of the above transactions happens when anyone who has obtained your address by one of the methods above sells it to willing buyers. You yourself have probably been spammed by people offering to sell you lists of email addresses, all of which would have been acquired by one or more of the techniques above.
If even one of the above applies to you, you have signed the warrant to have your email address spammed, but chances are that you have committed several of the above, compounding the problem. Again, it’s not your email provider’s fault that you get so much spam.
How can I receive less spam?
Two VERY effective ways to avoid spam are to use “supplier addresses” and rotating temporary email addresses. Let me explain both:
- Supplier addresses: For many years I’ve operated a system of what I call “supplier addresses”. If I’m dealing with Twitter, for example — not that I use their name because they were mentioned in recent news about a data leak — I create the email address “twitter@mydomain.com”, and I only give that address to Twitter, nobody else. (Actually, don’t create a new email address, just create a free alias for the email address that will receive email from that supplier.) Yes, I have the email address my-common-first-name@mydomain.com, but the only people who get that email address are my family, friends and existing clients. Nobody else on the planet gets that address, and I certainly don’t enter it into a form field on a web page and I don’t post it on the Web! So if Twitter (in this example) sells my email address or is hacked, I know exactly who let my email address into the wild. To be frank, that hasn’t happened to me many times, but I quickly realised that it does happen, so the email aliases I create now all include a number (e.g., twitter123@mydomain.com). If the email address is compromised I just change the number and inform Twitter by changing it in my account with them and kill the old alias. My numbering follows a system, but you can make your own rules.
- Rotating temporary email addresses: I link above to the service that NinerNet provides, but at this point it’s a very limited, non-automated service with very few customers. However, it’s not rocket science and you can do it yourself on your own domain. For example, if your primary address is bob@yourdomain.com, create a free alias for this month called “bob2402@yourdomain.com” on that address. I also create one for last month and one for next month, to ensure continuity when the month changes over. (The numbers in this example are obviously two digits for each of the year and the month.) Now you can give out the temporary alias to whoever you want with no concern at all about being spammed. Want to download that “free” white paper? Give them your temporary alias secure in the knowledge that when (not if) they start spamming you it will probably be after that email ceases to exist. Then at the beginning of next month, just delete one alias and create the next. In February I will have an alias for last month (2401), this month (2402), and next month (2403). On 1 March I will delete the January alias and create the April (2404) alias. If you have a contact form on your website for new customers to contact you, reply from this month’s temporary alias until they become a new client. At that point you obviously have to throw caution to the wind and start using your “real” email address, but you’ve already done a lot to hugely reduce the amount of spam you will receive from not following any precautions at all.
With a little imagination — but feel free to contact NinerNet if you need help — you can apply the above principles to all of the email addresses in your company, whether it’s just you or you have a thousand employees. They will drastically reduce the amount of spam you and your employees receive, before your email service provider’s anti-spam system even kicks in.
They key point here is that you need to practise “email hygiene”. How is your email hygiene?
