Some well-meaning boob sent me one of those "action alert, forward this to all your friends" type messages. Except, he didn't really send it to me, he sent it to mailman-owner@cagreens.org. D'oh!

He did just about everything wrong, and managed to score 8.6 in Spamassassin. I could have forwarded the thing to Hotmail and Telstra and got his accounts terminated. Spamming is illegal in Australia. But I felt sorry for him.

Hi Bill, I appreciate what you're doing. You're making some mistakes. I hope you'll appreciate some advice.

1. Careless address harvesting.
I suppose you created [name]@hotmail.com as a disposable address, since you're violating Hotmail's terms and you risk losing it. "mailman-owner@cagreens.org" is obviously not a valid address for anyone's personal email. You obviously didn't confirm its subscription, because that address obviously never subscribes to anything.

2. Bad email software.
If you're going to send a message to lots of addresses, you need to work on it more carefully than if you're just sending to one person. Don't use Microsoft Outlook Express. It doesn't give you the control that you get with a well designed standards-complying email program. Get a better email program. Consider Mozilla Thunderbird or Novell Evolution.

3. Untested message.
I'm using Apache Spamassassin. It's one of the most popular analyzers for incoming email. You hit eight of its triggers. You should test a mass email against Spamassassin and make sure it hits none, before sending it. I've included its report, below. Here are what the triggers mean.

4. Extra Message Part.
One of the many mistakes Microsoft Outlook Express makes, You included part of another message. MS-OE doesn't do that right. Compose your message fresh, or use a competent email program.

5. Big font.
Normal email between human beings typically doesn't include font changes and other complex formatting. MS-OE does a particularly bad job. Just look at all the useless junk it added. This one only gets a quarter of a point, so it won't trigger the subject tag by itself. If you're using HTML, stick to structural markup or use a very simple CSS.

6. HTML "TBODY" tag.
There is no reason to include a scrolling table cell in an email message. If MS-OE does it, that's reason enough to scrap MS-OE.

7. String of exclamaton points in subject.
Pling pling. Unprofessional, and spammy-looking.

8. Inline image included as an attachment.
Post the image on some convenient web server. You're on Telstra. Your account came with server space. Or don't use inline images at all.

9. To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Ridiculous. Put a real address in your To line. Use your own.

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