All you need to know about Spam

Stopping Spam – Some Useful Techniques

2008-03-04T01:47:00.000-08:00

Spam has existed for about as long as the Internet has. Across the Internet there are various ways in which spam can be posted. Spam in the form of emails remains the most dominate type of spam present on the Internet. 90 billion spam emails sent daily worldwide; a figure that that has more than doubled since 2005 at which point it stood at 30 billion.

As well as spam emails, spam can be seen across the Internet in the form of various aspects of media such as, websites, guestbook’s, forums and link spamming, Link spamming is when a normal link is manipulated to take you to a spammer’s site so that the site gains more hits and therefore increases the sites page rank. As well as this, links can be manipulated and placed on websites where the links tag looks innocent but when it is actually clicked it takes you to sites containing, for example adult content.

These along with email spamming happen on a regular basis, as you’re probably already too much aware of. Even if you have never posted in a chat room or forum but merely signed up to one, your details are still there, making it possibly for spammers to get hold of them in a way that is known as harvesting. Spammers use chat rooms and forums and ‘harvest’ email addresses that are posted on the site or that appear as member’s username. Due to this it is advised that if you need to give your email address out that you replace characters with words; for example yourname@domain.com should be written as yourname[at]domain[dot]com; this stops the spammers being able to harvest your email address.

An Anti-spam campaign that has recently been running to try and stop spammers altogether is one that involves downloading a screensaver to your PC, which has a statement referring to stopping spam. This screensaver, when idle on your PC, sends a lot of data traffic to website that sell the goods and or services that are mentioned in spam emails. The idea behind this was to get these spam sites running at a 95% capacity and to generate lengthy bandwidth bills for the spammers that are behind the sites.

This screensaver has apparently been downloaded more than 90,000 times and has already caused two big spam sites to go offline. Although this shows that the anti-spam campaign is working there is a chance that by doing this you are setting yourself up for more attacks in return to downloading the screensaver. Many discussion groups have also said that doing this could be a dangerous precedent which might cause vigilantism.

Downloading such a thing could also slow down your Internet connection and there is no guarantee that other sites that have nothing to do with spam won’t be targeted. Due to this I would recommend that the best possible way to fight spam is through the use of a decent anti spam software package.

Anti spam software packages will stop spam emails reaching your email account; filtering out emails that are from your contacts and that are also seen as safe emails from genuine people that want to contact you or your business.

As well as protecting your email account from spam messages, an anti spam filter system should also block 100% of viruses that could cause devastating harm to your business, including the loss of data. Outbound as well as inbound virus filters are another key feature to an anti spam system, which protects your company reputation by stopping your company spreading viruses unknowingly.

Anti spam filters/software are essential to the smooth running and operation of businesses, making them a wise investment before the damage of spam takes effect.

Helen Cox is the web master of MySpamBin, home of all your Anti Spam software/filter needs.

Spam Blocking

2008-03-04T01:40:00.000-08:00

Many people aren’t familiar with what a spam blocker is but say spam filter to them and they do. A spam blocker works on the same principal as a spam filter. Its main job being to stop spam from getting into your inbox, on matter what email provider or service that you use.

A spam blocker filter spam, junk mail and phishing email. There is a need now more than ever to block spam out of our email service. Most if not all of us have experienced a form of spam email at some point within our Internet use. A spam blocker works with the help of pre-programmed configurations and filters out junk mail.

In the world that we live in today, almost all of us benefit from the use of the Internet in some way. This could be for business or for pleasure. Sadly however as the Internet grows and becomes more advanced so do the spammers. They find new ways of getting past our spam filters and our spam blockers and they develop new ways of harvesting our email addresses from websites, no matter how hard we try to keep them hidden.

Most of the spam that many of us receive through our inboxes everyday is nothing more than commercial advertising; get rich quick schemes and products, mainly to do with pharmaceuticals. Spam floods the Internet with copies of the same message that take up space within our inboxes and cost us the time of deleting them; time that could, in a business sense, be spent doing more productive things.

One question that always arises when it comes to the issue of spam emails is isn’t spam just the same as traditional unwanted paper advertising? The answer is simply no. The mailers who distribute those paper advertisements have to pay a fee to distribute their material; spammers don’t pay anything but yet cause one of the biggest annoyances on the Internet. Another question that commonly gets asked when it comes to spam and spam blocking is does spam blocking count as censorship? Again the answer to this question is a swift no. censorship is the blocking of information based on its content; spam blocking merely keeps content in its proper place.

If you are receiving a lot of spam emails there are certain things that you should never do when taking action to, hopefully, stop yourself receiving spam. You should never ask to be removed from the spammers mailing list as all this does is demonstrates to a spammer that your email account is active and in use, which will result in you receiving more spam emails rather than less.

You should never respond to the spammer in anyway as doing this will tell them that you have received the spam email message and shows that you are reading the messages that the spammers are sending. This is why you should leave it up to your spam blocker to take care of the spam emails for you.

Helen is the web master of MySpamBin, home of all your Spam Blocker, Spam Filter needs.

What are Spam Filters?

2008-01-15T03:01:00.000-08:00

Spam Filters are there to help you block unwanted and unsolicited emails that come through to your inbox. Spam has a variety of names from spam mail, to bulk email to junk mail. Due to such a high amount of spam being sent these days they say every other email you receive is spam shocking I know so having a spam filter will help reduce this, it won’t get rid of every spam email you receive but it will help enormously in reducing the amount of spam email you receive in your inbox. Having a spam filter installed on your computer is now one of the barest necessities you need to help protect and reduce the amount of junk emails you receive.

You might be thinking well how does the spam filter know what emails are spam or junk and when they are actually legitimate emails. Well the spam filter analyses the content of each email and looks for specific keywords for example: free or guaranteed and then tries to interpret their meanings within the sentences. This may of course cause some problems as you may have legitimate emails that have these keywords in but they have been treated as spam email and that person won’t be able to send you emails again as their address will be blocked. If an email you receive comes in the form of Undisclosed Recipients then the email will be filtered through as junk, if the email comes through with your email address in the To or Cc fields you will receive the email with no problems.

To prevent these problems occurring you could use an add-on spam filter which allows you to control what emails should and should not come into your inbox. Once you have gone through this process which may take a bit of time in the long run, you controlling your inbox and spam box you will save a lot of time and energy.

Installing a spam filter is very easy; it can be installed on any computer system and help filter appropriate emails to your inbox and filter out junk emails. If you’ve decided to control the spam filter yourself you will need to set the parameters of what emails should be marked as spam and deleted. If you don’t trust the filter to just delete spam email you have the option to look at all the junk email filtered and decide yourself if you want it all deleted, this will take time but it may be helpful just to make sure no legitimate email is being deleted.

There are a wide variety of spam filters on the market for your home computer as well as a business computer. There are a new range of filters called smarter filters these are recommended for technical experts as setting the filter up is a complex procedure. The smarter filter fights and prevents spam very effectively due to they look into statistical data rather than the features of the spam. The filter analyses the whole email and compares it to other spam emails already identified. The success rate of these filters is 99% which is fantastic.

Jene Pedder is the Webmaster of MySpamBin who offer a definitive Spam Filter.

What can Anti-Spam Software Do?

2007-11-21T07:39:00.001-08:00

Anti-Spam software can help prevent you receiving spam emails which may contain rude photographs, links to inappropriate websites asking for your bank or credit card details, asking for charity donations or asking for money for some sick children in Africa, selling products and or services which aren’t appropriate for you or children to view as well many other types of inappropriate readings and pictures. Spam emails may also contain viruses, worms or Trojan horses which if opened attach to your computer and or email account.

No-one wants to receive thousands of spam emails especially in your personal inbox so you need to take action, if you don’t more and more spam emails are going to locate your address and send you even more spam. In a business email account you seem to get more spam especially if the email address is viewable on your website. If this is true you should create an email address for the purpose of your website and then all your website generated emails go into this inbox.

An Anti-Spam software package should include spam filters, which allow your normal mail to pass to your inbox with no problems but spam emails will be diverted into a spam or junk folder automatically. You should always check your spam or junk inbox though because I’ve found sometimes my normal mail goes it there too so always best to check before you delete all your junk emails. A spam filter will look for ‘buzz’ words, which are rude, inappropriate etc. then direct them to your junk folder. If viruses are attached to emails these are blocked usually by the use of single or multiple virus engines, which check every email, that comes through to your inbox. The filter also filters out inappropriate photographs and images, which is unsuitable for everyone.

You may not even know you have viruses on your computer at home or at work, so a good spam filter will not only check incoming emails for viruses but your outgoing emails too. If you send emails out to clients, friends or family you don’t want to send them a virus do you. So a good spam filter will protect both ingoing and outgoing emails.

A good Anti-Spam software package will provide you with information on what emails are blocked as spam and any other information you may want to know included what viruses may have been attached to certain emails.

Anti-Spam Software can not only help a business but a home computer too, so go get youself some Anti-Spam Software.

Jene is the Webmaster of MySpamBin who specialize in Anti-Spam Software .

What is Spam?

2007-11-21T06:18:00.000-08:00

So the question what is spam or spamming as its also know as, there are so many different definitions on what spam actually is so I will list a fee so you can make your own mind up:

· Junk email which is usually unsolicited – sending a mass of emails from commercial sites to people who haven’t ask for the email and also emails sent to annoy or harass the receiver which may include crashing their computer.

· Unsolicited email – advertising a product and or service, which will overload the receiver’s computer which will slow the computer down.

· The using of mailing lists – to blanket online groups, private email boxes with indiscrimination, unsolicited messages of a promotional nature.

· An activity – that tricks search engines into giving their site a higher ranking on searches via hiding keywords and submitting webpage’s daily to the search engine.

· Ian an inappropriate attempt to – send emails and use emails to send the same email message to numerous people who didn’t ask for the information as well as other network communications.

Spam emails has got worse over the last few years in 2001 only 8% of emails sent worldwide were spam at the end of this year 2007 50% of all emails sent will be spam. If you have a company website this is likely to get worse, as spam emails will come through your business email address.

Spam cannot only cause you the inconvience in having to delete them all, it can crash your computer, overload your email account stopping you from receiving and sending other emails but also time and money lost. Money can be lost by stopping you from receiving important emails and also by the time colleagues spend deleting and filtering spam emails, which will stop them from doing their normal job. Worms and viruses may also be included in spam emails, which can destroy data and your system information

There are ways of filtering spam emails with the use of anti spam software and spam filtering software. There are free packages available on the Internet to help you protect your home computer and your email accounts but if you are a business looking for anti spam and spam filtering software your best bet is to look into the many companies selling specially designed packages for businesses.

There isn’t a complete cure for spam but anti spam and spam-filtering software can help your spam emails reduce but you will always get a few that filter through to your inbox. There are other ways to minimize your spam including: -

· Don’t use your personal email account when you sign up to newsgroups, forums, mailing lists etc.

· Use web filters to filter out your spam.

· Don’t click on any links that are in spam emails, don’t give them any of your personal information and don’t buy anything from them.

· If you have a website remove your email address from the website, this can be done by using a form to do with validation.

Jene is the Webmaster of MySpamBin who specialize in Spam Filtering Software .