Back to Tips Index
Tech Tips Archive
Aug-16 2004: Can That Spam!
Spam is broadly described as e-mail that arrives in you
computer's Inbox from someone you don't know who's trying to sell you
something.
It's "junk mail" that gets its name from that famous pork meat product that
comes in a can. Both kinds of Spam are mass produced with each one identical in
content.
E-mailed Spam is the true scourge of the Internet. It wastes
your time as the recipient, often offends due to its content and clogs up
Internet resources. One 2003 estimate suggests that 90% of all e-mails were
Spam, many of them illegal in distribution and fraudulent in content.
This electronically generated "junk" has grown to epidemic numbers when
compared to the old-fashioned "physical" type that arrives in your mailbox. The
reason that Spam has become so widespread is that it costs next to nothing to
send out by the millions offering you everything from prescription drugs and
money-making schemes to mortgage deals and obscene material. And, despite
recently enacted laws aimed at protecting your privacy, the practice of
Spamming
is more prevalent than ever.
The first question you may have when Spam
arrives is simply this: "How did they get my e-mail address?" The basic answer
is that Spammers are resourceful. They trawl the Internet robotically, looking
for e-mail addresses posted on websites and community forums to add to their
mailing lists.
Worse yet, they target the common e-mail domains of an
Internet Service Provider (ISP) like aol.com or earthlink.net, for example,
adding random letters and numbers in the hope of finding a live e-mail address.
99.9% of the time they fail, but they only need to get lucky 0.1% of the time
when making millions and millions of tries.
Did you know that Spammers
use other people's computers to avoid detection when they e-mail their product?
They do this by sending out Spam viruses in e-mail which then sit on an
unsuspecting user's computer. Then, they use this computer to send out their
Spam with no concern for how much computing power this uses or how much it
costs
for someone to fix their system if it becomes infected with a virus.
So,
what can you do about Spam? Well, the thing you MUST NOT do is to angrily reply
to Spammers. By replying, you are letting them know they've found a real, live
target! The first thing you SHOULD do is get a Spam filter. Spam e-mail has
certain patterns in it that make it recognizable, and while the Spammers are
constantly coming up with new patterns to defeat the filters, the anti-Spam
people keep tracking them and issuing new updates.
Spam filters come in
two forms--those that you install yourself on your own computer and those that
reside on your ISP's mail server. The latter are usually the best, since they
stop you from wasting time downloading the Spam to begin with. The way to check
to see if your ISP provides a Spam filter is to log-in to your ISP's website
account and look under "Options" or "Mail Filtering". Your ISP regularly keeps
this filter up-to-date and usually such filters are very effective. If your ISP
doesn't have a Spam filter, you may want to change your ISP.
Common mail
programs such as Microsoft Outlook or special anti-Spam programs from
third-party vendors have Spam filters which automatically update. These filters
don't stop Spam from being downloaded. They simply place them in a junk-mail
folder or delete them, according to your wishes. If you're still getting a lot
of Spam you may not have the most up-to-date software.
And, while Spam
filters are great, they have one really bad drawback. They are not perfect.
Occasionally, legitimate e-mail that you want to receive is seized and deleted.
Of course, this can cause upset, confusion or delays between two parties trying
to communicate. This is why it's often not a good idea to set your Spam filter
to completely delete Spam, but rather, send it to a junk mail folder. Most ISP
Spam filters will also let you do this.
We hope this gives you a bit
more
insight into this murky world of Spam and what you can do to fight it.