Here we are again, still fighting the good fight. In this installment of a series discussing the elimination, or reduction of spam, I would like to discuss “SPAM BEACONS.”

A spam beacon is one of the ways that spammers can verify an e-mail address without having to entice you into answering their e-mail or trying to unsubscribe. They may have purchased a list of e-mail addresses or used dictionary attacks to gather potential “live” addresses. Now their quest begins to determine which address may have a human attached.

This is where spam beacons come into play. A spam beacon is an image that is embedded in an HTML e-mail address. It can be embedded in the art in the advertising or something as small as one white pixel. There is a code embedded in this beacon that is unique to your address. Once you open the e-mail or have it in a preview pane, the message contacts the spammer’s server for the images to be downloaded and the server builds a database of the addresses that request the information. That’s it for you, boys and girls. You are now in the database and expect to hear “You’ve Got Mail!” over and over again.

So what are we to do? If you are using Outlook, you can set it to not show pictures when you open or preview a message. Go to Tools/Options and, in the Window that comes up, click on the “Security” tab. The third heading down is “Download Pictures.” There is a bar that is labeled “Change Automatic Download Settings.” Click on this bar and another window will pop up. Read the instructions and set it to perform the way you want it to. I have mine set up to not display pictures and it gives me a bar across the preview pane where I can click if I wish to view pictures. This gives YOU control over what is shown on your computer screen.

Outlook Express works basically the same way by following the steps given for Outlook. You can also use an e-mail client that will not render HTML tags. There are other e-mail clients that will function in a similar fashion as Outlook and Outlook Express. Some of these are Thunderbird, Poco Mail, Pegasus, and Eudora. In fact, these clients had this feature before Microsoft implemented it in its clients.

I would like to think that, as more and more people use the image blocking feature, spammers will abandon the spam beacon as a method for locating e-mail addresses. Of course, we all know that something else will replace it and we will have to jump through some more hoops to block whatever they think of next.

The next article in this series, Part 4, will be the last. In it I will discuss other ways to avoid having your e-mail address harvested for use by spammers. None of these methods we are discussing will eliminate spam, but they will surely minimize it.

[tags]spam,spam beacon,embedded e-mail,embedded image,spammer,bam! eliminate spam! part 3[/tags]