Take Roger Ebert’s ''Boulder Pledge''
By Charles Miller

Recent columns have focused on the history of spam email and how the internet got into the mess it is today.

One loyal Atención reader emailed me some comments and obliquely referred to a different subject I had addressed earlier—the fact that the US government still holds what control there is over the internet.

The reader suggested that if the Communist Chinese controlled the internet, those two lawyers who started the avalanche of commercial spam in 1994 would have been put in front of a firing squad; no more spammers, no more problem. Perhaps there is something to be said for totalitarian regimes.

So what can we do to stop spam email coming into our inboxes? Lamentably, the answer is that once spam has started to arrive there is no way to stop it. The only way to avoid spam is to not let it get started in the first place.

If you are already receiving a large number of Unsolicited Bulk Emails (UBEs), then you have two options, neither of which is completely painless. Your first choice is to get a new email address and abandon your old one. Your other option is to continue putting up with the UBEs you receive. The option not worth considering is any product or service that advertises they can stop your spam. Some of these are expensive; some are so troublesome as to be almost worse than spam; and all I have seen are ultimately ineffective. The spammers are able to innovate faster than any anti-spam product can block them out.

If you decide to change to a new email address, I suggest you start by choosing the right name. Spammers often use “dictionary attacks,” where they send emails to every word and name in the book. When choosing a new name, try to find a unique one with a mix of letters and numbers.

Your next priority should be to keep that new email address private. This means never using that address in a public place. Spammers “harvest” email addresses used on message boards and websites.

Spammers’ incredible ability to harvest email addresses was pointed out in one experiment where a newly created email account was used to post a message in a

religious chat room known to be monitored by spammers. That new email address received its first spam 21 minutes later. My own personal experience was similar. It took 23 days after my email address was published in Atención for that address to receive its first spam. After three years, my address was receiving more than 1,000 UBEs a day.

One of the best ways to keep your address as private as possible is to have two addresses, one you give to people you can trust and another you use when it is necessary to make your email address public. The “public” address is a “throw-away” address you can abandon any time it starts to receive a lot of spam. Then start again with a new throw-away address.

Another thing that all email users can do is to take “The Boulder Pledge.” This is a personal promise first coined by the noted film reviewer and columnist Roger Ebert during a panel at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Conference on World Affairs in 1996: “Under no circumstances will I ever purchase anything offered to me as the result of an unsolicited email message.

Nor will I forward chain letters, petitions, mass mailings, or virus warnings to large numbers of others. This is my contribution to the survival of the online community.”

The Boulder Pledge is only a sociological position, but one I suggest we all read and follow.

Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981 and now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at 044-415-101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.