The Trouble With Spam Is....

Spammers rely on the widespread availability of email addresses and for people to reply to these emails or click on the links within the emails. Also never click on any hyperlinks in any junk email - this again confirms your existence and can lead to a virus being downloaded directly onto your PC. This simply confirms to the spammer that your email address is active. Use a free email service like Hotmail or Gmail for this purpose. For home users only distribute your email address to people you know and trust.

Spam The Spammer - Will It Work?

Spammers use open relays and hundreds of addresses to prevent you from finding their originating location. Last year, Lycos Europe rolled out a screensaver that conducted DDoS attacks against known spammers. Other fight-back tactics against spammers have failed in the past. Spammers operate under the same economic rules as the rest of us. If you don't order anything from a spammer and don't even click on his link to open the message, the monetary incentive for spam is removed.

Email Chain Letters - Harmless Fun or Not?

After you've clicked forward go through the email, delete all the email addresses that are hanging on to the mail of all the people that have recieved it with you. Perpetuating email chain letters is not a good idea. I learned about SPAM and about how to finally change my email address when it got overwhelming. Leave only the portion of the email that you think is funny or cute and take out all the instructions to forward to 10 - 20 - or 50 people and what will happen if you don't. This is like sending out an engraved invitation to spammers and scammers all over the world and suddenly the note from Aunt Joan is burried among 50 emails trying to sell you everything from viagra to stocks and bonds.

How You Can Avoid The New Dangers Of Spam

Rise in hijacked and spoofed email addresses means that someone can make it look like their spamming campaign is coming from your computer. If you haven't heard of phishing before, it refers to the misleading emails you get dressing themselves up to look like legitimate emails to get confidential, often financial, information from you. Some common examples are the Paypal or Bank emails that claim you need to login with your private information to verify contact information or update account information. Until recently, spam has been an annoyance, a definite load on your email system and network, a waste of productive time and money, but we are about to find that the cost could get much higher. Now, in the past the incidence of a virus travelling through email would be fairly predictable.

Spam - Its Whats For Breakfast

Since I have my own server, one of my e-mail addresses is not related to any of the big name e-mail sites like Yahoo, Hotmail or America Online. Senate passed legislation last week that would increase penalties for spammers on a national level and would start a do-not-spam list. However, the truth of the matter is it is very hard to catch and prosecute these privacy thieves. Gray Davis recently signed a bill that made a tough stand on spamming with fines from $1,000 per e-mail and up to $1 million per mass-mailing incident. Is it really necessary to feel victimized in your own home at your own computer? Luckily I know someone who helped restore my computer to its original state, but that doesn't stop the spamming or the pop-ups and it doesn't protect me from future invasion.

Is Email Dying?

I have 3 websites with different email addresses on, which can presumably be harvested for spam email lists. They may be blissfully unaware that, in some cases, good email will not reach them. They comply, in most cases, with the legislation, but the self appointed Spam Police have their own ideas of what email people should receive. It is a form of censorship if it snuffs out email that people really wanted to receive. I cannot foresee that email will die, even as a marketing tool.

Internet Theft and Fraud

This is where the use of Spam or junk-email is used to lure computer users to look-alike websites where they are deceived into giving out personal information and financial data. Often these emails are coming from trusted sources where hackers have altered links to send you straight into their 'pockets. Anything from credit card numbers to account information, passwords, billing data and personal phone numbers and addresses have been stolen and used for criminal purposes. I do know that when the country of Australia was founded it was done so on the backs of convicts, many of who had only stolen bread to survive. That's a kind of theft that will question your moral value system.

How Spammers Fool Spam Blacklists - And How to Stop Them

However, because spammers often change ISPs, re-route email and hijack legitimate servers, the spammer is a moving target. He is Chief Technology Officer at CipherTrust, the industry's largest provider of enterprise email security. Blacklisting is generally considered an unfriendly approach to stopping spam because the users most affected by the blacklist are email users who do not send spam. Many argue blacklisting actually damages the utility of email more than it helps stop spam since the potential for blocking legitimate email is so high. Blacklists are used because they can be partially effective against spammers who repeatedly use the same ISP or email account to send spam.

How Spammers Fool Bayesian Filters - And How to Stop Them

If the email has more spam tokens than ham tokens, the email will have a high spam score. The system utilizes the tokens with scores on the high and low end of the range and develops a score for the email as a whole. Words more likely to appear in spam are given a high score (between 51 and 100), and words likely to appear in legitimate email are given a low score (between 1 and 50. The email administrator determines a threshold score the system uses to allow email to pass through to users. Spammers have learned which words Bayesian Filters consider spammy and have developed ways to insert non-spammy words into emails to lower the message's overall spam score.

What SPAM Means: Stupid People Annoying Me

If your SPAM filter downloads data from your vendor for known SPAM sites make sure to perform and schedule the download to happen frequently. If you only speak English, and don't expect to receive e-mail in German, then block it. If you receive e-mail or spam from someone you don't know, do not respond to it, just delete it. Never give out your e-mail address unless you are sure the site or organization will be responsible for it's privacy. If you are starting to receive SPAM in alternate languages, check your e-mail client for the ability to filter / block SPAM by specifying language types.

Beware Of Spam Withdrawals

According to a recent study by eMarketer, the average Internet email user now receives 81 emails a day, and nearly one quarter of them are spam. Spam now makes up more than 40% of all email and costs U. Each have built-in filtering features that can help eliminate unwanted email by parameters you set. In other words, if spammers weren't profiting from sending unwanted emails they would go do something else. And the ladies that sent me email were so nice.

Evict the Spammers from Your Inbox

Even one false positive, or incorrectly blocked email, can have a significant impact on businesses today. When the users follow a link embedded in the email, they are redirected to a site that looks and behaves like the expected bank website. He is Chief Technology Officer at CipherTrust, the industry's largest provider of enterprise email security. In fact, there are hundreds of different message characteristics that may indicate an email is spam, and an effective anti spam solution must be capable of employing multiple spam detection techniques. Just as importantly, an effective anti spam solution should reside at the email gateway, not at the desktop.

Corporate Email Policies Lower Unnecessary Legal and Security Risks

On a final note, some clear guidelines for a good and effective email policy include the following points. Given the wide functionality of email, ensuring appropriate information access control for all of these points requires. Every company needs to establish a policy regarding use of and access to company email systems, and then tell all employees what its policy is. After you have created your email policy you must make sure it is actually implemented. Given that developments in email and the Internet are changing so rapidly, it is essential to review the email policy at least once every quarter.