Frequently Asked Questions about Spam

What is Spam?
How do spammers get my email address?
What can I do to reduce the risk of spammers getting my address?
Should I 'Unsubscribe' to these mailings?
Is Nantucket.net doing anything to reduce spam?
Is there anything I can do on my computer to help block spam?
Are there any programs available to help with this problem?

What is Spam?
Spam is junk email. There is little difference between spam and the paper junk mail that shows up in your home or office mail box.

How do spammers get my email address?
There are various ways spammers get your address
• Companies with whom you have done business and want to sell you something else
• Solicited mail is information you have (knowingly or unknowingly) signed up to recieve
• Companies that have purchsed lists from companies with which you have done business
• By looking up information that is readily available on the internet
• Believe it or not - they guess at names

How do I reduce the risk of spammers getting my address?
• Check the privacy policies of the companies with whom you share your email address, often they will have an 'opt out' option on thier order form so you will not recieve mailings.
• Disable the cookies on your computer (see the Help files for your system) However, remember that cookies provide functionality to many websites. Without cookies, Amazon.com would require your to enter your info each time you visit and Hotmail would require you to re-enter your username and password every time.

Should I 'Unsubscribe' to these mailings?
Unsubscribing and replying doesn’t help you reduce spam. Spammers get paid based on how many valid addresses they can get email to that will actually read the email. But how do they know that someone is reading their junk mail? They don’t. As soon as you send an email back to the spammer by sending an "unsubscribe" request, it means you've read the email. Now the spammer knows that your email address is valid and now worth more money than before. The irony of the whole thing? Your attempts to get off the spam lists have only caused you to be added to more lists.

Is Nantucket.net doing anything to reduce spam?
There is no 100% effective solution to stopping spam without accidentally blocking legitimate email in the process. This is the problem that is encountered by ISP's such as Nantucket.net who attempt to filter email before it gets to you. While filters placed by Nantucket.net can be incredibly effective, they can also cause legitimate emails to be blocked. We use several very powerful spam blocking programs on our servers as well as having an ever growing 'blacklist' of known spammers - over 10,000 to date.

We do catch more than 60% of the known spam and discard it before it reaches you. Taking into account how much spam shows up in your mailbox and the fact that we filter a large portion out already, you can only imagine how much junk is sent through out the internet! It is very difficult to stop spammers from the server side, mostly because spammers are constantly changing their address, making it almost impossible to block.

Is there anything I can do on my computer to help block spam?
The best way to reduce spam is by using Mail Rules . Outlook Express's mail rules allows you to set down your own criteria for filtering. At first it may look a bit daunting but with some practice you can create some very powerful filters. Other programs such as Entourage also have filtering modules - check the help files of your email program for more information.

Are there any programs that can help me with this problem?
Yes, you can go to www.downloads.com and see demos of some excellent spam filtering programs. In our offices, we use the AdAware program which is available there.