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General Meeting
by by Eric Saca - June 02, 2001 at 19:39:37:
In May, we were briefed on a wonderful new piece of software that can protect users from Internet spamming. Junk Spy was presented by one of its developers, Rollin White. Rollin, the former OS/2 SIG Leader and a long-time member and volunteer of NOCCC was introduced by George Margolin He joined the club right out of high school in the early 1990s.Rollin started his presentation with a slideshow about the new Junk Spy, Version 2.0. He first addressed the definition of junk e-mail (spam) which is also referred to as Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (UCE). Junk e-mail consists of messages sent to you that you do not wish to receive. It is usually trying to sell you something or encouraging you to visit a website. It is annoying and even just reading and deleting it is a waste of time. In large quantities, junk e-mail can be frustrating to process and can take up valuable inbox and hard disk space. As an aggregate, it costs ISPs and other Internet organizations bandwidth and resources. Junk e-mail is generally not from a company to which you gave your e-mail address, nor is it e-mail from a mailing list. The FTC did a survey in 1997 about junk e-mail. 60% of its respondents said that junk e-mail was 25% or more of their total e-mail. According to the EU ’s European Commission, junk e-mail costs users nearly $10 billion dollars annually.
Who primarily sends this spam? It’s usually not big businesses and retailers. It generally isn’t your Internet service provider (ISP). It’s usually fly-by-night operations selling bogus or questionable products. And most often, it’s promoters of adult-oriented websites. The volume of junk e-mail is increasing. It is a FREE method of advertising and there are virtually no repercussions for sending it. Attempts to legislate against it have and probably will continue to fail. Worst of all, if even a tiny percentage of people respond to it, this encourages the spammer to spam more because it costs the spammer NOTHING! What can you do about junk e-mail? There are both simple, non-technical as well as more involved and technical solutions. The simpler, non-technical methods are as follows:
• Change your e-mail address. This is very inconvenient, time consuming and often impractical.
• Don’t use e-mail. This would keep you from the benefits e-mail provides. It is also an isolationist action, cutting you off from your friends in Cyberspace.
• Don’t give your e-mail address to anyone. This is also impractical for doing business and removes you from the benefits of e-mail. More involved and technical solutions include the following:
• Send copies of the junk e-mail to your ISP’s e-mail abuse account
• Call the e-mailer and complain
• Use the e-mailer’s unsubscribe procedure
• Add the e-mailer’s ID to your e-mail program’s block list
• Rely on filtering performed by your ISP
• Use a third party to filter your messages. These methods basically require much time and effort. They usually produce little or no effect. Many of them generate more junk e-mail because you are responding to the e-mailing company which confirms that you are a potential customer. In other words, you can be adding your ID to lists that may be unfairly used to spam you, even though they are supposed to keep spam from you!
When using message filtering from your ISP or a third party, you have no control over what messages reach you. The filters may block legitimate messages that you want to receive. There may also be a privacy/security issue in allowing your ISP or a third party to work with your e-mail. There are also the following possible solutions, which are unpopular and not recommended:
• Join an anti-spam mailing list service
• Join an opt-out list
Rollin provided several suggestions on how to avoid spam in the first place, as follows:
• Do not post to newsgroups with your e-mail address
• Do not list your e-mail address on any web page
• Be aware of who you are providing your e-mail address to on a website (and why).
• Use the powerful new anti-spam program—Junk Spy. Junk Spy 2.0 automatically communicates between the e-mail server and your e-mail program. With an extensive database of clues and detectors, it identifies junk e-mail. It also uses external lists of clues and detectors, in addition to the database. It marks the junk messages and processes them the way you want them processed. This can include automatically deleting them, sending them to a special junk e-mail folder that you can check out later. Or, it can save them to a file and/or sound an audible alert message.
Rollin told us that Junk Spy has been tested to work successfully with most e-mail programs that download messages from an e-mail server to your PC. This includes Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora and Netscape. It is not supported by AOL and web-based e-mail, in which you do not download the messages but view them on-line instead. This also includes Hotmail and Yahoo! The first lines of code for Junk Spy were written in 1997. Thanks to the complexity of the task to distinguish junk messages from legitimate ones, Junk Spy was four years in the making. Two different designs and prototypes were thrown away in its development. Junk Spy’s clue/detector database is maintained and provided automatically for you. It results from an ongoing analysis of more than 25,000 distinct junk e-mail messages. Each clue in the database examines some portion of a message for signs of junk e-mail. The database is flexible in that you can specify exceptions to override its clues. The Junk Spy company automatically updates the database periodically through secure, encrypted e-mail.
Rollin provided us with a demon-stration of Junk Spy then answered some questions from the audience.
He mentioned Junk Spy’s price—$59 retail for the program and one year of database updates. The introductory price is $39. It can be ordered from the web at www.bmtmicro.com and www.indelible-blue.com. It can also be ordered directly from the company at www.junkspy.com or (562) 596-5121. A demonstration version can be downloaded from www.junkspy.com. Of course, for the privileged members of NOCCC, there was a special User Group price of $30, with Junk Spy paying the sales tax. (This was only offered the day of the meeting.) Rollin also provided two free copies of Junk Spy for the raffle.
The raffle also included a USB scanner, the Linux operating system and some games.
Next Meeting—Our own VP to be, James Smith, Game Designer par excellence. Just released the already popular Star Trek™ Away Team for Activision and Paramount (www.stawayteam.com). He will show and tell the tricks and “treks” of the trade for designing and programming games. He has lots to show you and is a great presenter. Don’t miss it.
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