Spam is a term that any person who has ever used emails must have heard of it. And Anti-spam is just the software or program that makes it disappear.
Spam refers to unsolicited, unwanted, inappropriate bulk email and is often referred to as Unsolicited Bulk Mail (UBM), Excessive Multi-Posting (EMP), Unsolicited Commercial email (UCE), spam mail, bulk email or just junk mail.
Any and all emails that does not come from an approved source is Spam.
Spam is bad because it costs time, money and Resources making email a significantly less attractive medium.
People send Spam for several reasons, which are selling products and services, promoting an email scam, drawing traffic to web sites and selling other money making schemes.
Spammers get the email addresses by first, companies you had dealings with selling their mailing lists to third parties. Second, by robots' to scour the Internet and harvest any email addresses that they find. Finally, by posting to newsgroups.
Usually one cannot tell who the Spam is from but experienced users can look the email 'headers' to find the origin of the message, but frequently the spammer will set up a one-time email account purely to initiate the spam email shot. When the email shot is finished, the account is closed. At other times, the spammer will forge headers making it difficult or impossible to trace the origin of the Spam, so finding the original sender will very often prove fruitless.
Reporting Spam isn`t that difficult task, it only requires a few steps, which are:
1. Identify the real source of the message.
2. Find the ISP responsible for the part of the net where the message originated.
3. Identify the correct person to contact at that ISP.
4. Word and send your report.
Spam is a big problem because property rights are difficult to enforce which makes it hard to get rid of Spam and the number of victims it involves and the private resources it consumes(many business people spend up to fifteen minutes per day reading and deleting their Spam emails).
Unfortunately simply unsubscribing won`t spare you from spam, because if you didn't have to subscribe to get it, there is little chance that unsubscribing will help you get rid of it.
Spam is considered illegal only if it promotes an illegal product or service.
DNS blacklists are lists of domains that are known to originate Spam. Many anti-spam software programs use these lists to control Spam by refusing any email that originates from one of these domains.
DNS blacklists are usually maintained by anti-spam organizations or by individuals who dislike spam and of course in order to know that a domain is producing Spam, the offence must be reported.
Email spam filters works in many ways normally depending on their kinds. There are the User defined filters which with you can forward email to different mailboxes depending on headers or contents. And we have the Header filters which look at the email headers to see if they are forged and finally the Language filters which simply filter out any email that is not in your native tongue.
Anti-spam techniques are broken to four categories, requiring actions by individuals, being automated by e-mail administrators, being automated by e-mail senders and those employed by researchers and law enforcement officials.
The Best Spam Fighting Tools and Services(Anti-spam) would be:
· Address Encoding Tools (26)
· Linux Spam Fighting Tools (9)
Anti-spam soft wares must be up to date to new spam and customized for each site's mail patterns. These free, easy-to-use programs works with any kind of email.
References:
1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, and 1998 by Scott Southwick and J.D. Falk.
Available from < http://is.gd/TKNTST> [1998]
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