Some of my geek speak

• Anonymous remailer. Where Vice President Dick Cheney sends his email from when he's in hiding. To make the complex simple, you send specially formatted email through a server designed to hide your identity. No spammer can reach you. Due to abuse you don't see public remailers like you used to. There are a few fee services around. I don't recommend you take this dramatic of a step to hide from spammers. If the mafia is after you that's another story entirely.
• Bounce. A fabric softener? Bzzzzt! Wrong answer. Email is bounced when it is returned to the sender as undeliverable due to some error. Most commonly, the recipient's email address is invalid.
• Domain name. IP addresses are easy for computers to use but hard for humans to remember. Domain names are an alias for an IP address. They are the www.somewhere.com or @somewhere.com addressing we're used to dealing with.
• Finger. This has nothing to do with the middle digit though I'd like to point that at some spammer now and then. Finger is a command that asks a mail server about one of its users. I rarely try it because, in my limited experience, I've never seen it enabled. But you run across Finger tools and the term from time to time.
• Harvester. An effective Internet metaphor. Farmers use harvesters to harvest crops. Spammers use harvester software to harvest email address. They harvest email addresses off of chat rooms, newsgroups, and web sites.
• Header. All email has a header section. It contains all the routing information so the email gets to the right place. It's sort of like getting a letter with a post mark. You see your address. You see the sender's return address. You see the postmark identifying where the letter was processed. Spam detectives use the header as the trail of bread crumbs leading back to the source of the spam -- if we're lucky!
• IP address. Computers on the Internet are each addressed by a unique number call an IP address. IP addresses take the format of 255.255.255.255. The obvious analogy is to that of an old fashioned postal address. If you're going to track spammers you'll being chasing down IP addresses.
• ISP. Internet service provider. Think AOL. Think EarthLink. ISPs are the folks you dial into to log onto the Internet. They host your web site. You send your email through them. They provide access to newsgroups. You get the drift.
• JavaScript. A programming language that's pretty handy for web developers because all browsers recognize it. In the context of spam, see my comments elsewhere.
• Mung. One of the most peculiar words in Spammeister's vocabulary. Mung refers to changing your return email address to something false. This trick is used widely in posting messages in USENET newsgroups. So myname@aol.com becomes myname@nospam.com. Why the trickery? Because spammers use special software to harvest email addresses from USENET posts.
• Open relay. There are some email servers on the Internet that don't authenticate the sender or recipient of the email to ensure it is coming from an email address on their domain or going to an email address on their domain. What this means is a spammer can use the open relay to send their email from. This dishonest activity hides their identity.
• Parse. You probably already know this one because it's not really different in the computer geek world than it is the real one. But, as a developer, I tend to overuse the term "parse". Basically, parsing is taking some text and reformatting it to suit your purposes. Sort of like what I do in the paper with the Junior Jumble.
• POP. Post Office Protocol (POP) is a standard email protocol for most ISPs. You log onto a server then download your email messages to your PC to read them.
• Spamhaus. These are the guys in the black hats who host spammers. And not by accident. If Darth Vader started an ISP he'd run a spamhaus for the empire.
• SPEWS. What Spammeister does after eating a tin of Spam? No, SPEWS stands for Spam Prevention Early Warning System. Okay, it's a bit contrived. SPEWS is an organization that keeps lists of known spammers. Refer to my links.
• Traceroute. Follow the bread crumbs to the source of your spam. Traceroute is a utility that allows you to follow the path spam took to get into your email inbox. It is an important tool if you want to figure out who to complain to about spam.
• Spam. Offically, it's called unsolicited bulk email or unsolicited commercial email. It's all those email advertisements that keep popping up in your inbox and you don't have a clue how the marketers got your email address. They're selling all those valuable products you simply can't do without. You can earn thousands of dollars a month at home with your PC. Buy a cable descrambler. Get loads of smut for free. Catch the wave of the latest fad diet. Get rich really quick with unsolicited stock tip advice. This stuff is so bad it makes me yearn for the return of Ronco television spots! Okay, so I got a tad carried away.
• Spoof. Look up "spoof" in the dictionary and you'll see it means "a hoax". Well, in spam talk spoof is a hoax that refers to email message headers. Spammers put fake information in their message headers so you can't trace the spam back to 'daddy'. That's spoofing. How does it feel to be a butt of their little joke?
• USENET. A network of discussions groups called newsgroups. Most ISPs include access to USENET newsgroups as part of their service.
• White list. The list of the good guy email addresses you want to get into your inbox. You set up your email filter to let them in and to keep everyone else out.
• WHOIS. Let's parse this one. WHO-IS. Who is. Still doesn't mean anything to you? Simply stated, WHOIS is a tool to query the various network registries to find out who owns a particular IP address. Ah, now you get it!