Spam
Contents
What is Spam?
Spam is the abuse of electronic communications
to send unsolicited messages. The most common type of
spam comes in the form of an email for commercial advertising.
However, spammers have developed other techniques such
as instant messaging spam, web search spam, weblogs spam,
and mobile phone spam.
Spamming is economically viable because advertisers have
effectively no operating costs except the management of
their own mailing lists. Organizations spend billions
to add extra capacity to cope with the never ending volumes
of spam.
Spamming can also lead to the mass-mailing of computer
viruses, worms, Trojans,
or other malicious software.
Email Harvesting
Email harvesting is what spammers use to gather
mass quantities of email addresses for spamming. Sometimes
spammers will even sell the list of email addresses to
other spammers, further compromising the users' email
addresses. A common way for spammers to gather email addresses
is using online forms, which require the user to submit
his or her email address in order to "subscribe"
to an "article". However, instead of subscribing
to an article, the user subscribed to a life-time of email
spam. More complicated but effective ways of gathering
email addresses is the use of software robots, that scan
websites for email addresses. These software robots use
certain tokens such as the '@' symbol to determine
if the string of characters is indeed an email address.
Cost of Spam
Spam, in the United States alone costs
organizations more then $10 billion in 2004, including
the lost of productivity, and the additional equipment,
software, and manpower to combat the problem.
Stopping Spam
There are many ways you can protect yourself from email
spam, which is by far the most common type of spamming.
- Spam Filters:
- Spam email can be filtered out at the desktop, email/server
gateway, or the Internet Service Provider's gateway,
or all three locations. A number of commercial spam
filtering programs. There are also many freeware,
and shareware spam filters available for
download. Spam filters have also become a standard
feature in almost all email clients, but the quality
of these spam filters vary.
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