about spam

hey today i am saying something about "Spam" its one of the irritating experience for email users

What is ‘spam’?

Spam may be the abuse of electronic messaging systems by  indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages, that is unwanted by the recipient.

these unsolicited commercial electronic messages includes email, sms, MMS, calling machines, faxes, IM.

The People who create electronic spam are called Spammers.

Costs of spam_.

The European Union's Internal Market Commission estimated in 2001 that "junk e-mail" cost Internet users €10 billion per year worldwide.In 2007 spam costs more than $13 billian in US only including lost productivity and the additional equipment, software, and manpower needed to combat the problem.Many also find the content of spam frequently offensive, in that pornography is one of the most frequently advertised products. Recently, there has been a noticeable increase in spam advertising websites that contain child pornography.

The secondary consequence of spamming is that search engine indexes are inundated with useless pages, increasing the cost of each processed query. Spam can be used to spread computer viruses, trojan horses or other malicious software. The objective may be identity theft.

How do Spammers operates.

The whole process of working of spam can be described in two phases:

(1) Gathering of addressing: the first job of spammer is to gather email addresses.But: 'how did we loose our email address'

Somebody send your email address using either the “To” or “Cc” field.once the computer of a person with your email address in a addressbook with your email address in an received email is infected with an harvesting virus,your email address is known to spammers.

Using automated program:spammer search the internet (WWW,FTP,Newsgroup) to try to find as many email address as possible.

Dictionary attack:- Spammer don't know your email address but try all words in dictionary.

(2) Delivering Spam message: A comman practice of spammmer is to create account on free webmail services(i.e.-Hotmail) to send spam or to receive email responces from potential customers. Because of ammount of mail sent by spammer, they require several email accounts and web-bots to automate the creation of these accounts.

_{How to deal with SPAM:}

The following techniques are described below to deal with Spam. Software to handle Spam:

(1) Check directly build into the MTA(Message Transfer Agent = Mail Server). Here we can usually reject the mail. i.e. We don't even store the email. We send an error code back as soon as we recognize that this is spam during reception of the email.

(2) Filtreing after the reception of mail - In this case the email is successfully delivered and mail will be filtered out later.

(3) Captcha : In an effort to cut down this abuse many of these services adopted a system called the Captcha. User attempting to create a new account are presented with a graphic of word.Which uses a strange font on a difficult to read background. Humans are able to read these graphics and required to enter the word to complete the application for a new account.While computers are unable to get accurate reading of the words using standard OCR (Optical character recognition) technique.

_{10 Tips to Reduce or Stop Spam. :}

1. Use a separate email address.

2. Consider acquiring multiple email addresses for different

purposes.

3. You can subscribe to online services to stop spam.

4 . Remove your email address from your website.

5.NEVER buy anything from a company that spams

6. Filter your email .

7.Make proper use of bcc & cc,To,to header files.

8.Don't display images in your email client.

9.Don't click on links in Spam message.

10. Don't install unkonwn “.exe” file.