Spam (Unsolicited or Junk Email):
Spam: What is it and how do I stop it?
Well as most of you may know and probably experience, spam is simply put: junk or unsolicited email. Most of these emails usually come in with subject lines like "enhance this, enlarge that, prescription drugs, and so forth.
These emails are not only bothersome, but costly to mail servers all over the world. Spam also is very time consuming and forces companies to be less productive and very costly have to sift through all the spam emails to determine which emails are legit and which are spam.
The problem with spam is that it is not only hard to stop but can be just as difficult finding out who and where the email came from.
In this segment of our website we are going to show and tell you ways of slowing spam down. I say slow down, because once again, spam is hard to completely stop and we will probably never be able to completely stop spam. However using some of the tips below one can deter, or slow it down a bit.
First things first; How do spammers get my email address?
Well there are several ways they can do this. But more importantly sometimes spammers don't have to find your email address or even know it. What most spammers do it what I call bulk mailing. They simply put in bogus emails into their "email program", say starting with the letter "a". (They can generate these types of bogus and totally random email addresses through a series of ways). Once they put in a random string of email address, the email program used, will send to all emails created on that list, whether they are valid or not. I mean who cares if they are valid or not, the return email address the spammer used is worthless anyway, therefore if the email on the list does not exist, there is no where for a return message to go.
Spammers can also get your email address by a number of other ways. Some can find email address on the Internet, especially if you have a webpage with your email address displayed on it as most companies do. Websites like 411, or yahoo personal search. Go to one of these websites and punch in your name. Even more shocking is go to a google search page and type in your phone number, see what happens!
A second more common way, is through spyware, chat rooms and profiles. For example, if you are a member of Yahoo or America Online, and you have a profile displayed, then all a spammer would have to do is sift thru a couple of profiles or go into a chat room and he has an entire list right before his eyes.
There are many other ways spammers can get your email address. Lot's of times, if a spammer sends you an email, and within that email there is an option to "remove your email from their servers". This is a smart ploy, however is not what it appears. A lot of spammers use this to validate that your email address is real and you are opening the emails that they just spammed you with. This will cause more spamming to occur to your account. So NEVER I MEAN NEVER, USE THE OLE "REMOVE" OR "UNSUBSCRIBE" FEATURE, unless it is a legit email coming from a well known place or website.
Another technique these spammers use are emails that are sent to you which contain pictures and links to their websites. First off, if you open the email, the pictures that the spammer has put in the email itself, have to download. This means that it has to "talk back" to their servers to download these pictures revealing that you have opened the email, and that your email and IP number are valid. Now they have you. If you do this to one email you can start receiving many spam emails after that. Also clicking on a link displayed in the email can also have the same effect.
Outlook 2003 has a nice feature that I like that doesn't allow pictures contained in emails to be downloaded by default. You have to enable the content to be displayed if you want to see the pictures.
However we will talk more about ways of slowing spam down in a second.
The last thing I want to tell you about is how spammers can send email to you without you knowing who they are or where they originated from.
This technique is known as spoofing. Anyone can just about spoof an email address. I would dare say 100% of spam emails have a spoofed or fake email address. Hence if you try to reply to the originating email address it will most likely bounce back to you or will not exist. On some rare occasions, the email address may be valid but is not the "real" person who actually sent the email to you.
Isn't it against the law to "spam" someone?
Yes it is, however some of the laws are just being passed that are addressing this issue. However what makes this law hard is finding out where and who the email originates from. Spammers have tricks that they can mask their identity and where the email originated from. This makes it hard for law enforcement to find them and to prove that the person is guilty of spamming. For more information about email and spamming laws, visit www.spamlaws.com.
Thanks to companies like AOL and Compuserve, there has been a new US law against spamming called "Canspam Act". This law addresses email fraud directly and carries heavy punishment for anyone caught breaking this law. However, as most things are with computer crimes, hard to prove.
Here are some links to read about "The Canspam Act"
http://www.worldlawdirect.com/article/1557/The_CANSPAM_Act.html
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d108:s.877:
Why can't I find out where the email originated from?
Well this is a simple and easy question to answer. Spammers are able to do this through what are known as "open proxies" or "open email servers". Yes, there are email servers out there (99% of them are in foreign countries, like Asia and the Caribbean), which allow email to be bounced or routed thru their servers. These email server are usually public and companies that own them have no concern about spammers using their server, that is probably why they are there. Unfortunately, we over here in the US can not do much about these "Open servers" because they do not reside in our country and the Internet being a "public domain", there isn't much we can do about it.
What if the originating server in which the email was sent through is a legit email server?
Well if this is the case, then there is something you can do about it. In fact, there is something you can do about email that is sent through one of the "foreign mail servers" I mentioned above. However you have a better chance of reporting spam coming from a known or legit email server than one that is not so legit.
For example, America Online. America Online has made leaps and bounds when it comes to spam. They pursue and try to prosecute these spammers if you report these spammers.
I have heard about blacklists or black holes, what are these?
Blacklists/Black holes helps with slowing down spam. How these work is simple. There are several companies on the Internet that have databases which keep up with these lists. These lists are generated by people like you reporting spammers to these companies. These services work by placing "known" "Spam severs" on the black lists. When a email sever or IP number is reported to one of these blacklist companies we called it "blacklisted". Most legit email servers do not want their servers to be on this "blacklist".
How can this "blacklist" help me slow down spam?
Most of these blacklist companies have a service that interfaces with other programs to "access" this database. In other words, let's say you have one of these programs that "work with blacklists" and an email comes from a spammer who is listed in one of these blacklist companies. This software grabs the email checks it against one or more of these blacklist companies and if the Ip or mail server is not on the blacklist it allows the email to come to you, if it is a known spammer, then it will "kick it out" or not allow it to be delivered. There are several programs out there that use this type of technology, programs such as "Spam Assassin" and a few others. Most of these programs will allow you to submit new spammers to the "black lists" if one or more slips through.
There is another technique being developed by Microsoft called Intelligent Filtering. This technique is used in the new version of Outlook 2003 and just recently Microsoft has released a version that works with Microsoft's high end mail sever product, MS Exchange. The technique was developed by Microsoft by screening the header, subject line and body of each email to determine if it is classified as spam or not. The "Junk Mail Folder" in Outlook 2003 plays on this technique.
There are many other ways to slow down spam, some are more effective than others. We have to use several programs to slow down spam at our office because we get so much of it. We use IP and subnet blocking, blacklist blocking and Microsoft Intelligent filtering as well and we still get anywhere from 1-2 spams a day. However before we implemented these filters we were getting 50-100 spam emails a day. We know we will never be able to stop spam completely, however we can at least slow it down.
Some techniques to help slow down spam!
1. Never unsubscribe to a spammers email. Only unsubscribe to legitimate emails.
2. Keep your email address off of newsgroups. If you want to submit your email on newsgroups, use a hotmail or yahoo account, they are easier to manage, and keep the spam off your primary account.
3. If you email address is public, then you may want to invest in programs such as Spam Assassin among many other's. Even upgrading and using Outlook 2003 is a good idea, due to the fact that the "Junk mail Filter" 90% of time works.
4. Accept the fact, that you will not stop spam completely. However, you can report spam to these blacklist companies, and I have even gone as far as finding out who the ISP service is and writing them a "not so nice" letter.
These are just some of the techniques we use to slow spam down. Be aware, spammers know most of these techniques as well. That is why they continue to find ways of getting spam through. I had an email the other day that had a header something like this: "va*gra, Ci$as, Lo*tab etc"
This technique is to fool the filters. They misspell the words on purpose to give the filter an illusion that it is a legit email. They also do this to get past your Outlook rules you may have set for dealing with subject lines that contain "words".
Spam will always be a problem, it is just another "nature of the beast" (as we call it). When we have a good and powerful tool such as the Internet there is always gonna be "bad apples" who take advantage of technology!