Many people identify sending mass email to spam. The word “spam” formerly used to identify the sending out of context to the discussion groups, but now the term has expanded its meaning and is used to denote “any unsolicited email” or “any email sent people who have not already requested. ” And Internet service providers are increasingly taking steps to protect themselves from spam by anti-spam programs, anti spam programs and these can be hazardous to your business, if you plan to use the bulk sending of email as a tool promotion.

If people who receive their unsolicited email, complain to your Internet service provider (ISP), or the company that hosts your website (your web server), you may end up losing both. This means your website will be closed and you lose all Internet connectivity. Read the rest of this entry »

“The scale and effect suggests that spam is a type of information security problem. It has many properties in common with denial-of-service and network intrusion. Spam is an unauthorized use of resources: bandwidth, storage, processing and people’s time.”

Paul Judge

30% of e-mail is spam
Spam exceeded normal e-mail in July 2003
Most annoying spams purport to carry free passwords to sex sites

Sources: Surf Control and Messagelabs

- Spam top 10:

1) Free adult site passwords
2) Low price drugs (Viagra)
3) Refinance your mortgage
4) Nigerian confidential money transfer
5) Tiny remote control car
6) Best online casino
7) #1 Pasta pot
Get out of credit card debt
9) Meet singles in your area
10) Copy DVDs in one click

I have found four different types of spammers:

1) Stupid: (all of they are but…) they post dozens of links in the same comment (even images), in addition they can post the same comment many times. They copy & paste the same html code.

2) Moderate: they post very simple comments like “nice blog” or “very interesting article”. They use the keyword (viagra,phentermine) as the name, this way they get high google rankings with the text links. They fail in the keyword as the name, do you know someone with viagra as his real name?. Also the url is another key to catch them! Read the rest of this entry »

Every day, millions of people receive dozens of unsolicited commercial e-mails (UCE), known popularly as “spam.” Some users see spam as a minor annoyance, while others are so overwhelmed with spam that they are forced to switch e-mail addresses. This has led many Internet users to wonder: How did these people get my e-mail address.

CDT embarked on a project to attempt to determine the source of spam. To do so, we set up hundreds of different e-mail addresses, used them for a single purpose, and then waited six months to see what kind of mail those addresses were receiving. It should come as no surprise to most e-mail users that many of the addresses CDT created for this study attracted spam, but it is very interesting to see the different ways that e-mail addresses attracted spam ? and the different volumes ? depending on where the e-mail addresses were used.

The results offer Internet users insights about what online behavior results in the most spam. The results also debunk some of the myths about spam. Read the rest of this entry »

“Spam” is the term for unsolicited commercial bulk email, this which started out a very small nuisance on the internet has grown to become something that plagues people every time they check their inbox. This spam fills up inboxes with unsolicited mail for services that no one could ever want. They cost time and money to those that receive them and the cost to the email servers and internet service providers (ISP’s) in then passed on to the consumers in the form of higher bills. Measures have been taken to put and end to this scourge and to prevent future spammers from arising.

Spam is an ineffective way to advertise as it provides people with information about products and services that likely are of use to no one. Many spammers are unaware of what they are doing and have probably been duped into some kind of “Get-Rich-Quick” scheme. In a article about the commercial uses of spam (from Alchemy Mindworks) it was explained the reason that people spam and how they might be unaware of the damage they are causing:

The most prevalent sort of junk e-mail is commercial advertising. Judging by the content of most of these messages, their perpetrators have all just signed up with an Internet access provider, and were given complimentary copies of one of the many “How to Make Lots of Money on the Internet” books. Some of them are genuinely inconsiderate of the rights of other users of the net ? the bulk of them, however, are merely confused, deluded and ignorant. Read the rest of this entry »

The problem of unsolicited e-mail has been increasing for years, but help has arrived. In this article, David discusses and compares several broad approaches to the automatic elimination of unwanted e-mail while introducing and testing some popular tools that follow these approaches.

The problem of unsolicited e-mail has been increasing for years, but help has arrived. In this article, David discusses and compares several broad approaches to the automatic elimination of unwanted e-mail while introducing and testing some popular tools that follow these approaches.

Unethical e-mail senders bear little or no cost for mass distribution of messages, yet normal e-mail users are forced to spend time and effort purging fraudulent and otherwise unwanted mail from their mailboxes. In this article, I describe ways that computer code can help eliminate unsolicited commercial e-mail, viruses,
trojans, and worms, as well as frauds perpetrated electronically and other undesired and troublesome e-mail. In some sense, the final and best solution for eliminating spam will probably take place on a legal level. In the meantime, however, you can do some things from a code perspective that can serve as an interim solution
to the problem, until (if ever) the laws begin to evolve at the same rate as public frustration.

Considering matters technically ? but also with common sense ? what is generally called “spam” is somewhat broader than the category “unsolicited commercial e-mail”; spam encompasses all the e-mail that we do not want and that is only very loosely directed at us. Such messages are not always commercial per se, and some push the limits of what it means to be solicited. For example, we do
not want to get viruses (even from our unwary friends); nor do we generally want chain letters, even if they don’t ask for money; nor proselytizing messages from strangers; nor outright attempts to defraud us. In any case, it is usually unambiguous whether a message is spam, and many, many people get the same such e-mails. Read the rest of this entry »

Comment Spam

We’ve all seen that comment spam is becoming a serious problem. Particularly on Movable Type weblogs, where the generated pages are all very similar in structure and semantics, spammers are abusing comment systems to increase their rank on Google.

Even more frustrating than the spamming problem is the fact that there isn’t a simple solution that will work for everyone and that all options have their own sets of pros and cons. During the past couple of months, we’ve been throwing around ideas at Six Apart about the best ways to combat spammers.

Readers of your weblog must register before posting to your weblog.
Before someone can post a comment to your weblog, they must register with your site.

For many webloggers, this solution is not ideal. Informal polling of webloggers has revealed that many do not want to require someone to register before posting. It usually discourages conversations from forming and is a barrier for open discussion. Additionally, without federation, logins on multiple weblogs become unmanageable. Read the rest of this entry »

Until now, antispam developers and their products have played defense only. But now, one activist wants spam filters to automatically launch attacks against suspected spammers’ sites to shut them down.

Fearing that spammers are increasingly finding ways to slip their unwanted messages past the current generation of filtering technologies, activists are taking a second look at a proposal to use denial-of-service attacks in the fight against spam.

Such attacks, which are illegal and can disrupt a company’s communications network by burying its servers in unnecessary requests, have traditionally been associated with pranksters who use viruses to distribute their attack software on thousands of computers.

Under the proposal, which was initially published in August by antispam activist Paul Graham, the attacks would be launched automatically by the next generation of spam filters. The attacks would be initiated whenever the filters received a new piece of spam containing a Web link. Read the rest of this entry »

If the maturity of a Web technology can be measured by the amount of attention spammers pay to it, then blogging has definitely come of age.

After a wave of aggressive spam attacks this month, bloggers suddenly found themselves scrambling for antispam weaponry and confronting the questions that have bedeviled e-mail and Usenet for years. How much openness can blogs afford? What freedoms are bloggers willing to trade to keep spammers out?

The problem of blog spam is not entirely new. Last year “referral marketers” began inserting their clients’ URLs into bloggers’ referral logs. Around the same time, bloggers began reporting spam occasionally popping up in the public comments on their sites.

Until recently, however, comment spam posed little more than an occasional nuisance. But after blogger Jay Allen saw spammers hit 120 of his posts over the course of four days, he knew the problem had reached a new level of urgency.

“I realized that day that we were facing a new predator in the jungle, and if we didn’t adapt ? and quickly ? it would be having us for dinner,” he said.

The latest wave of spam attacks focused on

Six Apart’s popular
Movable Type publishing system, whose built-in comments do not require registration and allow bloggers to block comments only by IP address ? a restriction spammers can easily avoid. “Movable Type’s comment system is extremely open, which is incredible for a community tool, but unfortunately also highly susceptible to abuse,” Allen said. Read the rest of this entry »