Spam is a different name for unwanted messages. Usually this term is used for unwanted emails, however also unwanted advertisement on websites (like forums and guestbooks) are spam. Spam is difficult to define. Not every initiative of people or organisations to contact you is spam. Spam is different from other forms of commercial communications because a messages gets send to a group that is much larger than the potential clients group. Because this separation has to do with the proportions, you’d expect it to be difficult to determine if a message is spam or not. Because of the enormous scale on which spammers are operating, in most cases, it is rather obvious.
Typical signs of spam:
- Messages get send in large numbers, to thousands of people at the same time.
- Spamming has a commercial goal. Usually the messages contain a reference to a product or website.
- Messages get send or placed without permission or knowledge of the website, or the receiver.
The economical reason for its existence lies in the low costs in sending an email or the placing of an unwanted reaction on a website. A spammer can send millions of spam messages for just one product for almost no money at all. For about 150 euro you can send about 200 million spam messages, which are more than 100.000 spam messages per euro. Worldwide there is a lively business with many millions of email addresses.
The costs are transferred to the receivers: against a small group of interested there is a much larger group who’s losing time having to delete the spam message from their mailbox.
More measures to prevent and fight spam
- Never buy at companies who sent spam. As long as people buy from spam companies, they will continue to spam.
- It is advised to be careful with handing out your email address, however, it is inevitable to stay completely spam free. A spam filter is one of the technical possibilities to help you. These filters exist for Outlook (Express), Thunderbird and other mail servers. Nowadays many providers install a spam filter on their servers.
- Spam filters can be divided into two categories.
The first category tries to identify spam by their typical signs. A message gets scanned for those signs and using those results gets a certain score. If that score is lower than the minimum, the message will be marked as spam and gets transferred to the map deleted messages. Most of the time, you can decide for yourself what to do with these messages. Possible signs are certain words associated with spam messages, but also the sender of the email address should meet certain demands. And in closing, often we use blacklists.
The second category chooses a statistical approach (often Bayesian). These filters are very accurate and have a very small number of false positives, but they do need to be trained. The user himself must collect hundreds of messages and specify whether these are spam or ham (the opposite of spam).
- Modern filters usually combine techniques.
- A spam filter almost never throws away a message. Out of fear of a false positive, messages get marked spam and still get send to the receiver. The annoyance remains.
- That marking sometimes is an additive to the subject line. If the message isn’t spam and you would like to respond, you’d have to manually delete the additive. In your mailing program, sort the messages by subject which will disable the ability for the additive to be added.
- Other spam filters add a message in the body of the message like; ”this message has been checked and has been approved”. Such messages are sometimes already added by smart spammers before they send the spam message.
- Another interesting way of fighting spam is the use of the so-called boxtrapper. With this system every new sender has to verify his/her email address for one time by answering a certain mail or visiting a special website. If the sender doesn’t do this all mail from this person gets blocked. Because spammers almost always use a false sending address, almost no spam reaches you. Despite this almost waterproof way of preventing spam, the boxtrappers isn’t used much as they are considered highly unfriendly.
- The downside to boxtrapping is that it doesn’t work with automatically send messages. It happens frequently that you have to give your data to a website and that the websites send you a mail that you need to respond to, to activate your account. Such a message gets blocked by the boxtrapper and that activation message won’t get read by the sender.
- Experience teaches us that a lot of people do know how to send an email, but don’t know how to respond to the check-up message. For example because it is in English. There’s also a chance that the check-up message gets caught by someone else’s spam filter.
- If two people have a boxtrapper and if one party sends a message to the other party, the check-up messages get send back and forth in an infinite loop. Your message will never arrive.
- Another interesting development has been started by Yahoo!. This internet company has developed a technique called domain keys. This technique is not really an anti-spamming method, but more of a way to verify if the sender is indeed the sender. As soon as there are enough users it’s a well enough sign that its spam due to the fact that spammers usually use false email addresses.
- There are commercial websites to send greeting cards. They’re very popular for birthdays and during Christmas time. The sender types his own email address and the addresses of all his friends at the website. As such he is not only being careless with his own email address, but also with the addresses of his friends. The friend gets an email saying there is a card for him at the website the sender used. If the friend presses to open the webpage, the owner of the website knows it’s a valid email address. So the advice is to not use such websites to send your friends greeting cards and if you receive one, control your curiosity and don’t click the link.
- To prevent spam by mail you can use a disposable email address (like Hotmail, livemail and gmail).
- It’s advisable with fighting spam to have an active stand and to report spam with several online services like SpamCop. This has a number of advantages; it helps to keep spam filters and block lists up-to-date which keeps the spam from reaching other users. Besides that, spammers will notice that spam send to your address get reported and they will most likely avoid our email address in the future, decreasing the amount of spam you’ll receive.
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