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What is Spam ?
When you open your inbox, very often
you come across a few dozen mails mostly advertising their
products and services. These unsolicited emails are called
‘spam’. They are nothing but junk mails that is not only a
nuisance but adds on to problems like using up a lot of network
bandwidth. As we all know that the Internet is a public network
and hence little or almost nothing can be done to stop spam
completely. However, today, to save the users from this problem,
service providers are giving an option of spam filters in the
e-mail programs that can be used to remove almost all the spam
sent via e-mails.
It is actually one way to make
people forcibly receive and view mails which they would not have
done otherwise. They are sent in huge quantities and generally
used by commercial advertisers for ‘how to–get-rich-quick
schemes’, finance options for mortgages and other loans, adult
or pornographic websites and drugs like Viagra. The advertiser
or sender, in most of the cases, does not pay any money; the
cost is borne by the poor and unsuspecting receivers or the
carriers.
Spam is also termed as UCE or Unsolicited Commercial Emails.
However, it must be noted that not all spam is used for
commercial purposes. While some spam can be illicit and against
the law, others may be an attempt to share the opinions and
views on controversial subject matters like politics and
religion.
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The various
categories of spam mails, besides commercial purposes are
• An attempt to share political opinions
• Sharing of religious opinions
• Appeals for charity or similar causes
• An attempt to spread malicious computer virus
• Chain letters
• Some financial scams
The whole topic of spam mail is
highly controversial and can be defined in a various ways. In
most of the cases, the spam e-mail lists are formed by using the
different email addresses found on the chat rooms, blogs and
discussion and message boards, IRC and web pages.
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Types of
spam
There are two types of spam:
• Cancelable Usenet spam
• E-mail spam
Cancelable Usenet spam –
Cancellable Usenet spam is one spam that is sent to at least 20
or more Usenet newsgroups. This spam targets all those users or
readers who read the newsgroups, give their addresses but
usually do not post their opinions or views. Usenet spam dupes
these readers and deprives them from the utility of the
newsgroups by providing a huge amount of advertisements or other
redundant information.
Email spam – Email spam aims
at the individual users by sending mails to his or her inbox or
mailbox. As mentioned above these addresses are gathered from
the various chat sites, web pages, message boards, news groups
or IRC and in a typical situation, the receiver has to bear the
cost. What is particularly bad about email spam is sending it to
mailing lists, both public and private email discussion forums.
The mailing lists contain the details of their subscribers or
users only and the spammers use some automated tools to sign in
as many mailing lists as possible so that they can get the
maximum amount of email addresses.
Besides the above two types, there is another dangerous variant
of email spam. This category of spam tries to persuade the user
or recipient to give away personal details like information on
bank account, credit card details and usernames and passwords to
their online banking systems like PayPal and eBay.
How can I stop receiving spam?
I have already mentioned that the world of Internet is a public
network. So, you cannot completely stop spam. Nevertheless, with
the use of spam filters and some anti spam legislation or rules,
you can control it to a great extent.
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What is
a spam filter?
As the name suggests, spam filter is a software program that is
designed to identify and remove all spam from the system. It is
usually installed on a mail server or on a mail client. One of
the very good spam filtering software for mail servers is Spam
Assassin, which a free product offered by the Apache Project.
The other popular mail client spam filter software is offered by
Microsoft Outlook. Outlook spam filter is good and is
extensively used. Today there a few companies that sell software
which they claim are designed to improve the Microsoft Outlook
Spam filter.
What is anti spam legislation?
To combat spam, many countries and states have passed laws
against the spammers. This is however a complex task. Tracking
of spammers is extremely difficult as many of them operate
anonymously and across the national boundaries. ‘Spam laws’ is
an all-inclusive record or directory of the anti spam laws or
rules that has been enacted all across the world.
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Spam
continues to grow each and every day – some statistics
The growth of email spam is rising each and every day. Way back
in the year 1978, a spam email message was sent to about 600
users. Large scale spam was first reported in 1994, when it was
sent to 6000 newsgroups, i.e. almost one million people!
Year Spam received per day
2005 30 billion (till June)
2006 55 billion (till June)
2006 85 billion (till June)
2007 90 billion (till February)
(Statistics courtesy –wikipedia)
Some interesting data
• Do you know that the world’s richest man, Bill Gates, receives
four million emails every year? And most of those are spam. And
guess what most of this junk mail offers – refinancing options
for debts or mortgages and get-rich-quick schemes!
• Proprietor of the website, www.acme.com, Jef Poskanzer,
receives about one million email spam every day.
• According to a study conducted by MAAWG in 2005, almost 85% of
mails received by users was spam (study was based on 100 million
mail boxes).
Not all is spam
However, not all unsolicited messages can be referred to as
spam. There can be some genuine propositions regarding to some
charity or some invitation sent to a recipient or a newsletter;
it might also be some messages from system administrators or
some misdirected mails; they might be unsolicited but definitely
cannot be termed as spam.
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Article Contributed By: Sukanaya
Banerjee
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