.: What Is Spam?
By:Daniel J.Fox
Category:Home / Internet / Spam
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. Report these frauds to your local US Postmaster. You may see e-mail coming from Nigeria or another African country, sent by someone who wants to use your bank account to transfer 20 million dollars. This is called a '419' scam and people have been killed over it.
Spam is flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it. Most spam is commercial advertising, often for dubious products, get-rich-quick schemes, or quasi-legal services. Spam costs the sender very little to send -- most of the costs are paid for by the recipient or the carriers rather than by the sender. To the recipient, spam is easily recognizable. If you hired someone to read your mail and discard the spam, they would have little trouble doing it. How much do we have to do, short of AI, to automate this process? I think we will be able to solve the problem with fairly simple algorithms. In fact, I've found that you can filter present-day spam acceptably well using nothing more than a Bayesian combination of the spam probabilities of individual words. Using a slightly tweaked (as described below) Bayesian filter, we now miss less than 5 per 1000 spams, with 0 false positives.
One particularly nasty variant of email spam is sending spam to mailing lists (public or private email discussion forums.) Because many mailing lists limit activity to their subscribers, spammers will use automated tools to subscribe to as many mailing lists as possible, so that they can grab the lists of addresses, or use the mailing list as a direct target for their attacks.
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.: New Spam Articles
1). Phishing For Your Identity
Phishing (pronounced as fishing) is defined as the act of sending an email to a recipient falsely claiming to have an established, legitimate business. The intent of the phisher is to scam the recipient into surrendering their private information, and ultimately steal your identity.
2). How To Recognize And Prevent Pfishing Scams
The warning notice you get from your bank over the internet may be a fraud. It is a scam intended to make you give up secure financial information. This article will show you how to recognize and deal with these frauds.
3). Investment Spam is Dangerous
Learn how to identify investment spam that has costed investors millions
4). Spam is a Beast
Spam has waged war on my sanity and I am helpless to do anything about it
5). Spam, Lovely Spam, Wonderful Spam
Spam is best defined as unsolicited and unwanted commercial electronic messages or e-mails that are sent to large numbers of people. The term is also used to similar abuses in other media, like messengers and newsgroups.
6). Awareness To Phishing Is Your Best Weapon
Many people are focused on building value online by making sites that serve real purposes and help us make the most of our time and our lives, while some are trying to exploit surfers and mine away value away from those who work hard building it into there sites. This article is about the ways we have to protect our selves from this very popular scamming technique.
7). The Pornographic Nature Of Spam
There is a trend in malicious SPAM which is wreaking havoc on many computers worldwide. Find out what you can do about it.
.: Top Spam Articles
1). Seven tips for securing your organization´s network from spam and email viruses
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.
2). Antispam Organization Out There That's Fighting For You
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.
3). Free Spam Blockers
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.
4). How to Reduce Spam in Your Inbox and Enhance Your Email Security
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.
5). Spam, What is it Good for, Absolutely Nothing!
Over time, unless the growth of spam isn't stopped, it will destroy the usefulness and effectiveness of email as a communication tool.
6). How To Tighten Up Your Email Security
These days email is a necessary part of communication. However, this also means that email is one of the most popular ways for a virus to infect your computer. You need to protect yourself from the threat of fraud and infection.
Viruses
Email attachments often contain viruses so you need to be careful whenever you open any type of attachment even if you know the sender.
7). How to Benefit from Comment Spam
Comment spam is annoying. Here's a quick piece on how to turn the tables on the comment spammers and use their comments to your advantage instead of theirs.