It helps to have that anti spam outlook

2007-03-08 10:33:40

( Computers )



An anti spam outlook in today's internet world is a necessity. Spam is such an issue nowadays that in 2003 the no.1 internet service provider in the US blocked two million spam messages from reaching its subscribers' email accounts. Estimates have it that 45% of the ten trillion messages sent around the world in 2003 were spam. Most, if not all people, with an e-mail account receive spam everyday, while some hapless individuals get a lot. Considering the rise in the number of internet users per day, just imagine how much this volume has increased after two and a half years and you can readily appreciate the benefits of having an anti spam outlook in both your home and office internet environments.

Spam explained
But before you can develop an anti spam outlook, you first need to understand what spam is. Spam is basically unsolicited commercial e-mails. You may send your friend an anonymous commercial link which you think may help, but unknowingly, you are already creating spam by contributing to e-mail pollution. The only difference, perhaps, is that you don't send it in bulk, as in thousands or more. And contributing to spam practically won't cause you anything.

Spam sources
Although you may get rid of spam in the meantime by using an anti spam software, millions of spam are created and sent out everyday. The question: where does a company or an individual acquire millions of e-mail addresses to send spam to? There are a number of seeds.

The first big source is newsgroups and chatrooms in big sites. Users, especially first-time users, leave their screen names and actual e-mail addresses for other people to find. Spammers then use softwares to extract these screen names and e-mail addresses automatically.

The second great source is the world wide web itself. Just imagine that there are tens of millions of e-mails scattered in the web. The third source are websites particularly created to attact e-mail addresses via promos or services which then after are sold to spammers.

Another common source is the dictionary search of the e-mail servers of large e-mail hosting companies. A dictionary type of hack utilizes a software that opens a connection to the targeted mail servers and then rapidly acquires million of e-mail addresses.

Stopping spam
Having an anti spam filtering software is the first right step in having an anti spam outlook. These filters scan contents of e-mails in search of strings of characters using a combination of methods from simple content filtering, bayesian-based filtering, challenge-respnse filtering, among others.

Another way is to update yourself on the latest list of IP addresses and websites used by spammers and restrict your system from accepting messages and exchanging from this list.


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