Email is a wonderful tool for communication, both at work and at home. It's almost as common today to ask for someone's email address as their phone number. Unfortunately most, if not all, of us have received some form of spam in our mailboxes as well as our intended communications.
Spam is officially known as unsolicited commercial email or UCE. The more common term "spam" was reportedly borrowed from a Monty Pithon's Flying Circus comedy sketch of the same name. The connection presumably being the annoying nature and apparent unavoidability of UCE and the similar use of the popular Hormel Foods canned ham in the sketch. Unlike the food product, email spam comes in a variety of flavours. Commonly we see prosthetic and drug advertising emails that use constantly changing techniques to attempt to thwart spam filters. These messages frequently have return email addresses that are non existent or that have been hijacked from some innocent party (sender spoofing). I'll walk through some methods of sending spam and discuss some techniques to help reduce the amount of spam you receive.
Since spammers, the people who originate spam email, need to protect themselves from being identified and blocked by intended recipients they have had to find ways to send a large number of emails from various locations in a very short period of time. The most common method of doing this is to use an open mail relay somewhere on the Internet. An open relay is a mail server that will forward email from anyone (or anyone who knows how to get around security measures) to any potential recipient on the Internet. In the early days of spamming the sender would usually create a new email account on a large free mail hosting service such as Yahoo! or AOL and send emails to a large list of recipients. As the hosting companies clamped down on this type of activity they began to use complex scripts with multiple open relay servers and large lists of recipients. Today most commercial email providers block relaying, but many smaller companies who host their own email servers often don't have the technical skills required to turn off relaying while still allowing their users to send and receive emails that they need to. The lists of email addresses that spammers send to are created using various methods. Some companies sell lists of email addresses gathered from their web site. Since email is sent unencrypted over the Internet, the addresses can often be gathered by "listening" to traffic between servers. Sometimes they will even send email to random names in an email domain (a domain is the part after the @ in an email address) and see which ones don't bounce back to them (directory harvesting).
A few methods to help avoid spam are to not enter your email address in web forms or use it to enter draws. In cases where you need to do this, consider creating a "spam account" with one of the online email providers like Yahoo! or GMail. Use this account when you're dealing with companies on the web that you don't know. If your Internet provider offers a spam filtering solution it may be worth subscribing to it. On a larger network where email is hosted in house, an anti spam appliance or dedicated server software are the best defence as they offload the traffic from the mail server. Some PC based spam filters work well, but they usually need a subscription to keep up to date so they can continue to work effectively. Spammers are constantly changing their methods so new defences need to be defined and applied. Junk mailboxes and blacklists that are built into applications such as Microsoft Outlook also help, but they tend to rely on filtering by the sender and these days the sender is changed with every mailing that goes out.
Just make sure you put my email address on your white list.
Recent Comments