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Home / Internet / Spam
A World Wide Web Of Spam
By:James Monahan
Curiously enough, the word spam is a negative reference to that pink, hulk of meat that comes in a can that, most people say, has no nutritional value whatsoever.
In more common internet terms, spam is one or more messages sent repeatedly and massively to countless e-mail address, often resulting in flooded and crowded mailboxes all over the world.
What started out as another insistent branch of internet advertising has now evolved into something that the U.S. government is gravely concerned about.
Even without knowing the word "spam," you are most probably aware of an annoying circumstance when you opened your mailbox to find countless of worthless messages, often linking you to equally vague and suspicious websites and offers.
Internet experts have declared that spam costs money for both consumers and internet providers. Why? Simply because the consumers have to waste time in opening e-mail that is not relevant to their lives, and therefore throw away precious minutes that they have paid for through their for providers.
This may not seem to be of such great magnitude if we're just talking about spam that took 10 seconds to open, but think about something like 5,000 people all over the country each opening 10 spammed e-mails and you've got an alarming number, and this is already thinking very conservatively and small-scale.
As for the providers, they are the ones who get a barrage of complaints whenever their clients get flooded with spam.
The cost of providing free minutes to placate these customers, plus dispatching staff to work round the clock, plus the added stress of assuring their clients that they are not in league with the spammers, all make up a very difficult and costly business.
Concerned U.S. officials have been fighting spam for almost a decde now. And while there are now several software that can detect and filter spam, hackers have also become better at grabbing mailing lists and developing their own software to bypass all these filters.
Suddenly, you can't just tell if an e-mail is spam by simply looking at the subject line where garbled characters often appear. You'll find that not only will they address you with your first name, you'll also see that the sender has a name that seems vaguely familiar to you.
It seems that spam is everywhere. You can't join mailing lists, internet newletter subscriptions, or even go into online gaming without expecting to get spammed along the way.
People nowadays are cautioned to be careful whenever they are prompted for their e-mail addresses.
It would also not do to trust a spam's content. Oftentimes, these e-mails contain invitations to vague and shady businesses such as pornography, multi-level marketing companies, miracle cures, and obscure products, products that are so totally worthless that it's proprietors would certainly not invest in good money to have them advertised the normal way.
In truth, using spam as an advertising tool costs less on the advertisers, and more, much more, on the consumers.
What To Do About Spam
Most spammed e-mails give you the option to be removed from their mailing lists -all you have to do is click "remove" or "unsubscribe." Experts, however, warn that this is just misleading information.
The truth is, all you would actually get out of doing this is validating your e-mail address as a working one, therefore giving these hackers more reason to include you in more mailing lists to eventually sell to more and more clients who will surely send you more spam.
Even as the concerned officials battle it out with hackers and spammers, there are also ways that you can participate, even indirectly:
1. Make sure that you wade through your e-mail to actually find out if an innocent message got lost in the sea of spam
2. Notify anti-spam groups of new tactics that you observe, either firsthand or through your close friends and family
3. Don't fight spam with spam. If you are angry at having been spammed, don't threaten the spammers or worse, send them your own spam. This would be really wrong, not to mention ironic
4. Be patient with your provider. Chances are, they are doing the best they can to fight spam.
5. Don't hit that "remove" or "unsubscribe" button. You now know that it doesn't work. Tell other people about it.
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Article keywords: spam, emails, advertising, delete, mailbox, message, website
Article Source: http://www.articles2k.com
James Monahan is the owner and Senior Editor of
SpamTour.com and writes expert
articles about spam.
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- 1). Free Spam Blockers By : Matt Garrett
Remember when spam was just another horrible thing you would never eat? And then you grew up a little and spam became the lyrics to a great Monty Python song. And now spam is something to avoid at all costs. Or, in the case of free spam blockers, at no cost at all. Everything is better when it’s free, right? Such is the case with blocking out annoying spam from your email account, too.
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- 2). Save Time, Money and Hassle - Stop Spam By : Justin Brown
Spam can be an absolute nightmare, and one that seems to spiral out of control in some of my email accounts. If i've been away for a few days and haven't had a chance to check my emails, I dread having to open up my email client when I get back online in anticipation of hundreds or thousands of spam emails.
Although I simply delete these emails, for some, they seem legitimate messages that can often cause the recipient to become the subject of a fraudulent activity.
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- 3). Antispam Organization Out There That's Fighting For You By : Robert Michael
There's an antispam organization out there that's fighting for you and could use your help.
CAUCE, the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail, is an all-volunteer global entity that began as SPAM-LAW, a group brought together for discussion only. They put all their efforts into getting legislation passed that would help stop and penalize spam.
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- 5). Real Businesses Send Spam, Too! By : Jerry Weinstock
Unsolicited Commercial Email or Spam has grown at epidemic proportions. It is rapidly becoming the number one problem that Information Technology departments deal with on a day-to-day basis, surpassing computer viruses. The volume and percentage of unwanted email received in business and personal email inboxes is starting to overwhelm and drown out legitimate email.
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The most prolific and path breaking innovation of last century had been the developments in the communication field. It literally changed the business working, product marketing, support services and most importantly, the advertisement campaigns.
But just like all goods things comes with a price, so was the communication. It brought in the problems of Spam Emails.
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- 7). How Do Anti Spam Solutions Work? By : Paton Jackson
We have all suffered from these annoying dangerous spam emails. Most of us still do. There are excellent anti spam solutions in the market, there is no reason to tolerate this no more.
To understand the solution we must first understand the problem. So, what is this spam email? Spam is unsolicited, unwanted, irrelevant or inappropriate email. Spam email is mostly used for commercial purposes.
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- 8). How to Reduce Spam in Your Inbox and Enhance Your Email Security By : Richard Rogers
Spam is the internet’s equivalent of junk mail. Spam is defined as an e-mail message sent to people without their consent or permission. Addresses of recipients are often harvested from Usenet postings or web pages, obtained from databases, or simply guessed by using common names and domains.
Spam is sent to promote practically any product or service ranging from “Adult” products to logo design for websites.
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- 9). Seven tips for securing your organization´s network from spam and email viruses By : Todd Green
Seven tips for securing your organization´s network from spam and email viruses
Providing security against email related threats has become a burden for most IT professionals in 2006. According to a recent study by Postini, spam and email viruses now make up to 80% of all emails sent out as compared to 50% in 2000. As a result, IT professionals now face a tougher challenge in providing network security for this amount of spam.
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With anti spam vendors offering low cost licensing, businesses can now afford advanced email spam and virus protection with a simple to use interface at a much lower cost. The great thing about technology is that as it evolves it gets faster, additional features and economical. Over the past few years the same evolution has taken place with anti spam technology and services.
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| New Spam Articles |
- 1). Identifying Spam When it Arrives By : Keith Londrie
Most of us have opened our email program and found, alongside correspondence from people that we know, offers for products from commercial web sites. Some of these emails we expect. We have asked to be notified of sales and other opportunities or joined a mailing list offered by the company.
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- 2). Save Time, Money and Hassle - Stop Spam By : Justin Brown
Spam can be an absolute nightmare, and one that seems to spiral out of control in some of my email accounts. If i've been away for a few days and haven't had a chance to check my emails, I dread having to open up my email client when I get back online in anticipation of hundreds or thousands of spam emails.
Although I simply delete these emails, for some, they seem legitimate messages that can often cause the recipient to become the subject of a fraudulent activity.
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- 3). A Quick Look At Email Spam Filters By : Oliver Turner
You must be eagerly finding for a way out to stop receiving Spam mails in your inbox. Take a quick look at email spam filters to get some idea on how to check spam. There are a number of email spam filters that you can use in your computer. For official purposes, you have anti server software spam where the spam filter is located in the server level to trap all email spam.
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- 4). An Introduction To Spam Filters By : Peter Emerson
Using spam filters is another very effective way of combating spam or junk mail. These programs use some keywords like ‘guaranteed’, ‘free’, etc and block any email with those words in them. But this has the disadvantage of sometimes blocking even important mails from your contacts and preventing those senders from sending mails to your address again.
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- 5). What Is Spam? By : Daniel J.Fox
You have probably seen an increase in the amount of junk mail which shows up in your email box, or on your favorite newsgroup. The activities of a small number of people are becoming a bigger problem for the Internet.
Chain letters that ask for money, whether for reports or just straight up, are illegal in the US whether they are in postal mail or e-mail.
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- 6). Fighting Spam! By : Darry J.Oswald
It's been nearly a decade since spammers and their enemies begun evolving competitively. As with the classic cheetah/gazelle model originally formulated by Darwin, each time one group becomes a little faster or more agile, its adversaries develop traits for outwitting and outrunning it.
In addition to wasting people's time with unwanted e-mail, spam also eats up a lot of network bandwidth.
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- 7). Two Main Groups Of Spam! By : Camry James
There are two main types of spam, and they have different effects on Internet users. Cancellable Usenet spam is a single message sent to 20 or more Usenet newsgroups. (Through long experience, Usenet users have found that any message posted to so many newsgroups is often not relevant to most or all of them.) Usenet spam is aimed at lurkers, people who read newsgroups but rarely or never post and give their address away.
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- 8). Antispam. Aren't We All! Don't You Just Hate It? By : Robert Michael
Antispam. Aren't we all! Don't you just hate it? You've got enough to do without having to sift through a bunch of worthless, or worse yet, offensive junk e-mails in your Inbox.
So what can be done about it? What antispam procedures and software really work?
Spam filtering software is the first stop in your antispam campaign, but in some ways it's the easiest to subvert.
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- 9). Everybody Hates Spam By : Jay Ashley
There is nothing like checking your email only to find out that your inbox is swamped with unsolicited message from people you do not know. No you’re not interested to buy dog food, beauty products, slimming pills, plants, or software! But still, you get these irritating emails.
Spam, this tiny four letter word has annoyed millions of people around the world.
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- 10). The Spamming Trap For Online Business Beginners By : Rami Doleh
People who begin their online business ventures would naturally be unaware of many of the internet business rules, protocols and etiquettes. Yet, as in any law, the internet law does not forgive for ignorance. One of the most important issues that are governed by many controls over the internet is Spamming.
A beginner in online business can very easily fall unintentionally into the spamming trap while conducting internet marketing activity to promote his/her business.
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