There you will see when the last login was effectuated, and using which IP address. You can also click on “Details” to see a list of the last logins, their IP address, browser and so on. All you need to do, therefore, is to check if you are really the only person using your Gmail account!

Make sure that you pass on this trick to everyone you know, just everyone. Most common culprits are friends and relatives who might be more interested in keeping track about your activities and the idea of getting caught will keep them away from your Gmail account! Start using all the social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, Orkut or Digg to spread the word around – passing the link to this article, telling everyone that you’ll find them out if they tried looking through your Google Mail account.

Steps to setup forwarding on Google mail:

G1. Login to your newly created Google mail account for the experiment.

G2. Click on Settings Tab (on top right corner)


G3. Go to the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab.


G4. Select “Forward a copy of incoming mail” to coherence.experiment1@googlemail.com

and select delete Google Mail’s copy.


G5. Save Changes.

Steps to setup forwarding on Hotmail:

H1. Login to your newly created Hotmail account for the experiment.

H2. Click on Options on the right hand side of the page. Drill Down to “More Options” link.

H3. Click on the Third Option “Forward Emails to another email account”.

H4. Select “Forward your email to another e-mail account” and enter the email address as coherence.experiment1@hotmail.co.uk


H5. Click on Save.

To avoid spam, ideally users must drop themselves off the mailing lists of any friend or colleague who indulges in forwarding emails to dozens of people collected together in ‘To’ lists. Every time your address is passed around, it opens the door to spammers.

Typical forwarded emails contain pictures, jokes, or e-mails received from others, this is particularly the case between co-workers – the latter risks the whole company e-mail address book getting into the hands of spammers: a fate suffered by many university departments.

You really shouldn’t feel guilty about not forwarding on e-mails, and it is good practice to delete all but critical messages anyway.

However, even though you don’t actively participate in these round-robins, the mere appearance of your address in a list can invite trouble.

Should you need to email a large group of people, then you should use the BCC feature wherever possible, as this prevents spammers getting access to your network of contacts.

It’s also important to delete any propagating list of contacts and email addresses that appear within the body of a received email prior to forwarding it on.

PS: Official emails may be the odd exception in some scenarios, but treat every forwarding decision with care.

If you are planning to start off your own website and need to list your contact email address on the ‘Contact Us’ page of your site, here’s a simple piece of advice.

Ideally you should use techniques listed in Email Best Practice #1. However, should you think that your readers will get confused by using special characters in the listing of your email address, one simple technique is to use picture file of your email address in ‘jpeg’ or another image format. We have listed a couple of samples below.

Most web crawlers don’t have the functionality to perform OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to identify the text of an email address within such an image.

Unfortunately, this technique is only viable provided you are allowed to upload an image, something that not all blogs, websites and fora allow. Nevertheless, be prepared! So whenever you create a new email account, at the same time produce and save a small image using any of the image editing tools available. The images below were created using Microsoft Paint – an application that comes free with every Windows installation.

Here we show you how to set up a brand new (and free) e-mail address for some of the more popular hosts. Since you will be setting up a number of different e-mail accounts and you want to avoid confusion, you must keep a journal of each login name, e-mail address, when it was created, all associated security information, and on which experiments you are using it etc.

Steps to setup a Google Mail email account.

1. Go to web page: www.gmail.com

2. Click on ‘Sign up for Google Mail’

3. Type in any ‘First Name’, ‘Last Name’, ‘Desired Login Name’ – since you don’t have to use your real name, just type in something that differentiates this e-mail address consistently among all the others you have created. Use something like ‘experiment294’. The Login name should be between 6 and 30 characters. Click the ‘check availability’ button to see whether or not it is being used by someone else – if it is then try a new login name. Your e-mail address will then be created as experiment294@gmail.com.

This is necessary because you shouldn’t have any consistent/coherent procedure for inventing the e-mail names themselves, as this could be predictable by spammers and could distort the number of spam e-mails coming your way.

4. Choose a password – it must be greater than 8 characters, and it is best to contain alphabetic and numeric characters. Make it quite complicated, and use the same one for each new e-mail you produce: for example ‘12bnXS1jKg’.

5. Re-enter the same password to check that it is correct.

6. Make a note of the First Name, Last Name, Desired Login Name, and password in your journal.

7. Tick the box if you want the computer you’re using to remember the password.

8. You can the procedure both with and without Web History enabled, and see if it makes any difference to the spam you receive.

9. Choose a security question, say ‘your first phone number.’ Enter any numerical 12-digit sequence ‘121343565787’, and use the same security question and answer with each e-mail you are creating. Note this in your journal.

10. Leave the secondary e-mail address blank.

11. Click on the country where you are located.

12. Complete the CAPTCHA Challenge Word verification by reading the distorted words in the panel and type them into the space provided.

13. Click I accept, and your e-mail account will be created.

Steps to setup a Hotmail (Microsoft) email account.

1. Go to web page: www.hotmail.com

2. Click on ‘Sign up’.

3. Type in ‘Windows Live ID’ and select ‘Hotmail.com’ as the domain name. Use something like ‘experiment224’ which differentiates this e-mail address consistently among all the others you have created. This is necessary because you shouldn’t have any consistent/coherent procedure for inventing the e-mail names themselves, as this could be predictable by spammers and could distort the number of spam e-mails coming your way.

The Windows Live ID should be between 6 and 30 characters. Click the ‘check availability’ button to see whether or not it is being used by someone else – if it is then try a new Windows Live ID. Your e-mail address will then be created as experiment224@hotmail.com.

4. Choose a password – it must be greater than 8 characters, and it is best to contain alphabetic and numeric characters. Make it quite complicated, and use the same one for each new e-mail you produce: for example ‘12bnXS1jKg’.

5. Re-enter the same password to check that it is correct.

6. Enter any ‘First Name’, ‘Last Name’ – since you don’t have to use your real name, just type in something.

7. Do not fill your alternate email address, instead select a security question.

8. Choose a security question, say ‘your mother’s birth place’. Enter name of any city.

9. Make a note of the First Name, Last Name, Windows Live ID, password, security question and answer in your journal.

10. Select the country, state and a random postcode where you are located.

11. Select your gender.

12. Enter a random birth year between 1950 to 1990.

13. Complete the CAPTCHA Challenge Word verification by reading the distorted words in the panel and type them into the space provided.

14. Click I accept, and your e-mail account will be created.

Steps to setup a Yahoo! Mail account.

1. Go to web page: http://mail.yahoo.com

2. Click on ‘Sign up’.

3. Type in any ‘First Name’, ‘Last Name’, ‘Gender’, ‘Birthdate’, ‘Location’ and ‘Postcode’ – since you don’t have to use your real name and other details, just type in something.

4. Type in ‘Yahoo! ID and email’ and select ‘yahoo.com’ as the domain name. Select a Yahoo! ID that differentiates this e-mail address consistently among all the others you have created. Use something like ‘experiment394’. The Yahoo! ID should be between 6 and 30 characters. Click the ‘Check’ button to see whether or not it is being used by someone else – if it is then try a new Yahoo! ID. Your e-mail address will then be created as experiment394@yahoo.com.

This is necessary because you shouldn’t have any consistent/coherent procedure for inventing the e-mail names themselves, as this could be predictable by spammers and could distort the number of spam e-mails coming your way.

5. Choose a password – it must be greater than 8 characters, and it is best to contain alphabetic and numeric characters. Make it quite complicated, and use the same one for each new e-mail you produce: for example ‘12bnXS1jKg’.

6. Re-enter the same password to check that it is correct.

7. Make a note of the First Name, Last Name, Yahoo ID, and password in your journal.

8. Leave the Alternate email address field blank.

9. Choose a security question, say ‘your main frequent flier number.’ Enter any numerical 12-digit sequence ‘121343565787’, and use the same security question and answer with each e-mail you are creating. Note this in your journal.

10. Complete the CAPTCHA Challenge Word verification by reading the distorted words in the panel and type them into the space provided.

11. Click the ‘Do you Agree?’ Checkbox, and then press ‘Create My account’ button and your e-mail account will be created.

I started collecting spam, studying it! Of course I make sure to use (free) e-mail accounts extraneous to my normal Internet existence to avoid disruption. Thanks to Google, Yahoo, Hotmail that’s easy. Now I intend to send e-mails consisting of one word (‘holiday,’ or ‘car,’ or ‘restaurant,’ or ‘loan’), using one unique e-mail account for each experiment (and not using that account for anything else), and wait to see what pops up – then drawing charts of the rate of incoming spam.

Some of the accounts I’ve set up are left unused by me, so I can attract in and have a control experiment of the type of spam e-mails that are out there in the white noise. Having run one experiment with Gmail for nearly a year I can report that only two welcoming e-mails have arrived, and those within two days of setting up the account. So much for the ‘urban myth’ of e-mail providers precipitating spam! You should try it out for yourself – be a scientist and don’t take my word for it.

I’ve just challenged the students on my course Global Consequences of IT (GCIT) at LSE to see who can attract the most spam – the winner gets a free lunch at a local Thai restaurant. I’m interested in the various strategies they can devise to maximize spam attraction.

Try this out for yourself. Set up your own laboratory, and learn to love spam! The Internet is truly a wondrous ecosystem composed of the most fabulous creatures – spam is just one. It’s fascinating getting to grips with their Natural History.

This all came about following a discussion over a Starbuck’s latte on these and other Internet myths, which I was having with one the GCIT students, Heemanshu Jain. We’d just come from a seminar at LSE given by the founder of a successful Social Network. The entrepreneur had described how serendipity had played a large part in his success; a survey undertaken among his smallish network had been picked up by the international press during the ‘Silly Season,’ and the membership consequently exploded.

That got us to thinking about how ideas percolating on the web generating relatively little attention can suddenly become coherent and reach a critical mass, exploding into the general consciousness. Heeman and I bounced a number of ideas around – everything from why Google, Facebook, Amazon and e-Bay should become successful, and why similar sites should fail, to the ubiquity of spam. We were only too aware of the coherent urban myths out there that have absolutely no basis in fact. Hence we decided to undertake some simple experiments, starting with the humble spam.

We soon saw the sheer scale of the problem, and recognised the potential of setting up a blog (under the name WebCoherence) to invite fellow travelers with a similar fascination in how the web works, and how various web phenomena become coherent, to join in the experimentation.

We’ve still to work out the practicalities, but if we can interest a large enough number of people, then we can focus ‘The Human Computer’ at the issue, and find out some very valuable statistical information about the reality of how the web operates.

 Come and join us!

WebCoherence has concluded from its experiments that leading Email companies including Gmail (owned by Google), Yahoo Mail (owned by Yahoo) and Hotmail (owned by Microsoft) do NOT gratuitously circulate user email addresses to potential marketeers. It is often the users themselves who invite spam into their mailboxes because of their uninformed actions. WebCoherence, therefore, has recognized the need of educating users so that they improve their internet usage in order to attract less spam.

One of the key reasons for receiving spam is because users leave their email addresses on the public world wide web. They list their email addresses on websites, blogs and fora. These public places on the internet are readily accessible by crawler programs searching for live email addresses. Some companies collect email addresses in this way, selling them on to anyone willing to buy – spawning the spam.

If you wish to avoid spam, it is advisable never to leave your email addresses on the public world wide web. Of course there are times when you need to be contacted, and in such situations it is advisable either to leave a free ‘throwaway’ email address that you discard after having received the required reply, or to use the following format:

username [at] domainname [dot] domain extension

for example: John_Doe [at] webcoherence [dot] org

Or you could use other special characters:

John_Doe +@+ webcoherence +dot+ org

John_Doe {at} webcoherence {dot} org

Recipients find these alternative formats easy to understand, whereas most crawlers will overlook them. Consequently you can expect less spam.