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Posted on 04.06.07 by Admin @ 9:32 pm
Spam will continue spreading as far as it makes profit. If nobody buys from spammers or acts upon their scams, spam will end. This is the obvious and easiest way to fight spam. You can ignore and delete spam emails you receive. But you can also take vengeance on the spammer by complaining to the spammer’s Internet Service Provider (ISP). The ISP will block their connection and maybe impose a fine (depending on the ISP’s acceptable usage policy). Spammers beware of such complaints and try to disguise their messages. That’s why finding the right ISP is not always easy. Let’s look inside a spam message. Every email message includes two parts, the body and the header. The body is the actual message text and attachments. The header is a kind of the envelope of the message. The header shows the address of the message sender, the address of the message recipient, the message subject and other information. Email programs usually display these header fields: From: shows the sender’s name and email address. The From: field usually contains the sender’s email address. This lets you know who sent the message and allows you easily reply. Spammers, of course, don’t want you to reply and don’t want you to know who they are. Therefore, they put forged email addresses into the From: lines of their emails. So the From: field won’t help you if you want to determine where the spam email comes from. Tip! With G-Lock SpamCombat you can easily preview not only the message text but also all the fields of the message header . You can choose the preview format by yourself. You can view the message as HTML, decoded message, or message source.There are also several Received: fields in the header of every message. Email programs don’t usually display the Received: lines but the Received: lines can be very helpful in tracing the spam origin. Just like a postal letter goes through a number of post offices before it’s delivered to the recipient, an email message is processed by several mail servers. Each mail server adds a line to the message header – a Received: line – which contains - the server name and IP address of the machine the server received the message from and Each Received: line is inserted at the top of the message header. If we want to reproduce the message’s path from sender to recipient, we start from the topmost Received: line and walk down until the last one, which is where the email originated. Just like the From: field the Received: lines may contain forged information to fool those who would want to trace the spammer. Because every mail server inserts the Received: line at the top of the header, we start the analysis from the top. The Received: lines forged by spammers usually look like normal Received: fields. We can hardly tell whether the Received: line is forged or not at first sight. We should analyze all the Received: lines chain to find out a forged Received: field. As we mentioned above, every mail server registers not only its name but also the IP address of the machine it got the message from. We simply need to look what name a server puts and what the next server in the chain says. If the servers don’t match, the earlier Received: line is forged. The origin of the email is what the server immediately after the forged Received: line says about where it received the message from. Let’s see how determining of the spam email origin works in real life. Here is the header of a spam message we’ve recently received: ************************************************** Reply-To: umceqhzjmndfy At first, look at the forged From: field. The email address in the From: and Reply-To: lines doesn’t exist. So, the spammer took care about directing bounced messages and all the indignant replies people may send to a non-existing email account. Secondly, the Subject: line. It contains the variations of the “Meds” and “Viagra” words that are known to be met in spam messages. Plus, the subject contains a range of random characters. It’s obvious that the subject line is skillfully tailored to fool anti-spam filters. Lastly, let’s analyze the Received: lines. We start from the oldest one - Received: from 164.145.240.209 by 60.17.139.96; Tue, 07 Nov 2006 05:53:35 -0500. There are two IP addresses in it: 60.17.139.96 says it received the message from 164.145.240.209. We check if the next (and last in this case) mail server in the chain confirms the state of the first Received: line. In the second Received: field we have: Received: from unknown (HELO 60.17.139.96) (221.200.13.158) by mail1.myserver.xx with SMTP; 7 Nov 2006 10:54:16 -0000. mail1.myserver.xx is our server and we can trust it. It received the message from an “unknown” host, which says it has the IP address 60.17.139.96. Yes, this confirms what the previous Received: line says. Now let’s find out where our mail server got the message from. For this purpose, we look at the IP address in brackets before the server name mail1.myserver.xx. It is 221.200.13.15. This is the IP address the connection was established from, and it is not 60.17.139.96. The spam message originates from 221.200.13.15. It’s important to note that it’s not necessarily that the spammer is sitting at the computer 221.200.13.15 and sending spam over the world. It may happen the computer’s owner doesn’t even suspect of being sending spam. The computer may be hijacked by a Trojan, which is spreading spam without the machine’s owner knowing it. We hope this information will help you identify the spammer’s ISP and report them about spam so they can take proper measures. About The Author Filed under: Email Spam Comments: None |
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Posted on 04.06.07 by Admin @ 9:31 pm
All spam emails we receive every day in tens or hundreds are annoying and disgusting. But the worst of them are scams, hoaxes, and illegal schemes aimed at defrauding you of your money, private information, and even your life. Being aware of how the spam scams work you will be able to protect yourself against the spammers-fraudsters and not to become a victim of their fraudulent schemes. A lot of spam scams arrive in the form of a great investment offer. It usually works as a Pyramid scheme. Spammers ask you to pay money for a membership, goods, or simply to “invest” promising you much money as revenue. Your revenue will come from those people who will invest after you. Your investment is distributed to those who joined before you. At some point the pyramid ruins because there are not enough new investors to keep the money flowing. The spammer is at the top of the pyramid and he is the only one who benefits. The scan may not always look like an investment offer. The spammers can ask you to distribute some advertising letters to a list of email addresses, for remuneration. Although they will tell you that the list contains only opt-in email addresses, it’s not true, and you will be sending spam directly from your computer. Another fraudulent scheme you may meet looks like a letter coming from a company that you do business with. Usually the spammer asks you to follow a link within the message supposedly to update your account. But actually this is done to worm you out your personal and financial information. If you click on that link, you will be brought to a page that will look like a company’s web site. While you are logging in or filling the form in, the program is recording your keystrokes and all your private information – account number, user name, password, social security number – is disclosed. Never click on the links included in such emails. Just open a company’s web site in a separate window and check your account details out. Nigerian spam is one of the most dangerous email scams. The mechanism of the scam is simple. The spammer sends you a badly spelled letter on behalf of a government official, deposed ruler, or relative of a ruling family asking you for help. They have some goods, money, or jewels that they cannot access due to political reasons. They ask you to allow them transfer large sums of money into your bank account. They promise to remunerate you for your kindness, or even leave all money to you. Attractive offer, isn’t it? Don’t be a dolt, don’t believe them. They tempt you into a trap. Their object is to obtain your account number and bank transfer information. They also may ask you to send them a fee to bribe some corrupt government officials. Further you may receive additional officially looking letters where you will be asked to provide further documents, private information, and money. When they have “played” with you long enough, or believe that you may suspect to be led on, they will rob you and quite. Take care! Don’t react upon any spam message whatever tempting offer it contains. Delete it at once, or let an anti-spam filter delete all spam before you download it into your inbox. About The Author Filed under: News Comments: None |
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Posted on 04.06.07 by Admin @ 9:31 pm
Almost everyone who accesses the Internet and uses e-mail knows about spam. The common definition of spam is e-mail that is unsolicited, undesired by the recipient. Spam is sent out by automated programs to thousands or millions email addresses at a time. In most cases spam emails offer you different services, products (medicines, goods, software programs etc.), and “get rich quickly” plans. You can simply delete them if you receive several unsolicited emails per day. But if you get tens or hundreds spam messages every day, it is a real problem. In order to understand how to deal with spam in your inbox, let’s examine some core questions concerning spam: Why send spam? The right answer is to make money. If you have never opened a spam message, you should not think that others don’t do it either. Among thousands or millions people who receive spam you can always find one or several persons who actually purchase services or products the spammers advertise, or join the “get rich” schemes the spammers offer. Of course, they lose and the spammer wins. How do spammers obtain email addresses? Spammers use special software programs that search websites, forums, newsgroups and harvest posted email addresses. They can use computer viruses and spyware to steal the email addresses from personal address books. Spammers often purchase lists of email addresses from other spammers, or from some dishonest companies, which do not care about the privacy of their customers’ information. What danger lies behind spam? Never buy pharmaceutical drugs such as Valium, Viagra, Cialis, Anatrim, etc. advertised in spam emails. These medications are counterfeited for 99% and can be dangerous. Viruses - one of the most common computer security threats - can also be spread in spam emails. The worst thing is that viruses slip onto your computer without being noticed. You may think that you will download new free software when you click on a link within a spam message but actually you will get at least one virus infection - most probably a trojan virus. This type of virus can destroy data, steal your personal information such a user name, password, or just download other nasty software onto your computer that will cause more harm. A virus can hide itself in a picture, video or audio file. Certain anti-spam programs such as G-Lock SpamCombat let you preview the messages in a safe mode, i.e. they don’t allow any suspicious pictures to be downloaded nor malicious codes to be executed. A virus is a nuisance but phishing is a real danger. This type of spam is becoming very popular now. This is a method of tricking consumers with the purpose to worm them out of their personal information such as bank account numbers, passwords, user names, and credit card details. The spammers send a fraudulent email that usually appears to come from financial institutions like Ebay or Paypal saying that there is some trouble with your account and that you need to update it. There is a link within the message that you should follow to update the account details. The web site usually looks like a real company’s web site. But as soon as you start filling the presented form in, the program starts recording your keystrokes and your private details are now disclosed to the spammer. How to fight spam? It is prudent to use an anti-spam filter to block annoying, time consuming, and sometimes dangerous spam emails. Anti-spam software checks your incoming emails and immediately moves spam messages into a special trash folder. If you want a good internet security suite that includes a spam blocker, consider BitDefender Professional Plus, Kaspersky Internet Security, F-Secure Internet Security or eTrust Internet Security. For a standalone spam filtering program, look at McAfee Spam Killer, G-Lock SpamCombat, Spam Assassin, Mail Washer Pro or ZapASpam. About The Author Filed under: News Comments: None |
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Posted on 04.06.07 by Admin @ 9:30 pm
Almost everyone who used to communicate via e-mail has ever found in the Inbox the messages from people he doesn’t know proposing some services or products. All unsolicited and undesired messages you receive are SPAM. The emails of this kind usually offer pharmaceutical products, diet methods, sexual enhancements aid, and “get rich quick” plans. You can also meet bogus sales pitches, sales opportunities, and different types of scams. In addition to stock scams, in which spammers encourage you to invest money, a new spam-scam gambit called phishing is becoming very popular now. This scam is aimed to obtaining people’s private information such as user name, password, credit card details, etc. An example is an email coming from PayPal or Ebay asking you to go to the company’s web site and update your account. If you do it, the spammers will record your keystrokes and your private details will be disclosed to them. And have you ever received pitiful letters from a widow or a relative of the former ruler of Nigeria? Sure you have. It’s a famous Nigerian fraud that is still having a place on the Internet. Don’t be enticed by the millions they would promise you. All they want is your bank account details in order to rob you. How do you identify spam among legitimate messages? You usually look at the sender’s name, which may be unknown to you or contain some gibberish. You also read the subject line of the message. As a rule the subject line of spam emails concerns gambling, pornography, or an offer to make a fortune in 24 hours. But the spammers are also able to create an email identical to legitimate one coming from a respected source. In other cases, the subject lines may indicate that the message is a reply to your email. A general way to distinguish spam is to read the To and From header fields in all the messages you receive. If you see strange, anonymous or scrambled alpha-numeric email addresses (for example, gt4590xx@domain.com) then you have spam. Some anti-spam solutions provide you with the capability to preview the emails. For example, in addition to a safe message content preview, G-Lock SpamCombat allows you analyze the message header in detail: From, To, Subject, Received and other header fields. How to block spam? Remember, the point of spam is to have you open the email. Once you do it, the least trouble you may have is to let the spammer know that your email address is valid. It’s luck for a spammer. He can continue spamming you in the hope that earlier or later you will swallow the bait. Or, he can sell your email address to someone else. Also, be aware that spammers send millions emails at a time, so even a very tiny response rate is a great success for them. Let’s imagine that 100 out of 10 millions people invested 5 dollars each into a scam offered by a spammer. So, the spammer makes 500 dollars at a time. If you are really suffering from a continuous spam flow, you can consider getting a new email address and disclose it to trusted senders only. Or, you can start clearing your inbox from spam right away using anti-spam software. Although not perfect, anti-spam filters are now very sophisticated and very effective at cutting out most of spam. Anti-spam programs basically do one or more of the following things: 1. Check the senders’ email addresses and names against a blacklist of spammers they own and delete the message if the sender is on the blacklist. 2. Check the recipients’ email addresses and names and filter the messages according to certain parameters. For example, if the email is sent to a large group of recipients sorted alphabetically, the email is considered spam. 3. Analyze the message content and subject line and search for certain words or phrases, which are typically met in spam emails such as “Viagra”, “Cialis”, “Mortgage”, “Invest” and filter the spam email accordingly. There are many kinds of anti spam solutions now. Software developers offer standalone spam blockers like Mail Washer, Spam Nullifier, G-Lock SpamCombat, etc. Most of the big, free email services such as Yahoo!, Google, MSN, and Hotmail also provide effective spam filtering. You just need to choose the right anti-spam solution that will serve you in the most effective way. About The Author Filed under: News Comments: None |
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Posted on 04.06.07 by Admin @ 9:30 pm
The damage spam brings you is huge: loss of time, bandwidth and money, risk to delete a legitimate message together with junk emails. So, an anti-spam filter is not a whim but a necessity for almost all PC users who actively use email. What criteria should you follow to choose the right spam filtering program? What capabilities must an anti-spam tool have to filter and cut off spam mail in most effective way? Here are the main features a good anti-spam software must have to block spam effectively: 1) it should be a standalone spam filtering tool, which checks all incoming emails on the server, detects and deletes spam messages. 2) deletion of spam without receiving it in your inbox. This way you won’t download all the superfluous kilobytes into your inbox and you won’t see annoying spam mail. 3) powerful antispam filters built in one program that analyze the message from “outside” and “inside”: message header, message body, and message source. Flexible whitelist and blacklist easy to edit and update are also very useful as they help save much time when filtering emails. Good anti-spam software must also have the Bayesian filter in its arsenal of spam filtering tools. 4) easy and safe method to preview emails marked as spam. Inherent in antispam technology is the fact that there will be false positives and false negatives, i.e., email can be flagged as spam even though it is not actually spam and vice versa. 5) flexible spam filtering. Spam emails should be moved to a separate folder. A good spam filtering software should provide the ability to recover an email if it was accidentally marked as spam and trashed. Simply put, an anti-spam program must be a standalone, easy-to-use software supplied with powerful anti-spam filters able to be adjusted by every user for his personal needs. Now with all that said above you can choose the right anti-spam software among all spam filtering programs available on the Internet. About The Author Filed under: News Comments: None |
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Posted on 03.21.06 by Admin @ 1:55 am
Is Your Website Blacklisted? A blacklist, as the name implies, is a list of people or companies who have met with the disapproval of others. In the online world a blacklist refers to those people who have been marked as responsible for generating spam in a very big way. Blacklists are also known as blocklists. Blacklists are used to combat spam in a very specific way. When spam is reported to one of the relevant spam fighting organizations the IP address the spam originated from is added to a banned or blacklisted IP addresslist. An IP address is the unique location of you or your website on the Internet - think of it as your “home address” online. To put it simply every www.domain.com Internet address has a matching IP address. Any email coming from your website domain also has a corresponding IP address. If your IP address is present on a blacklist then you’re potentially wasting your time sending email to customers. Why are you wasting your time? Modern spam blockers come with the most common blacklists installed and/or allow you to import updated blacklists into your spam blocker. This allows to you block a huge amount of spam but you may also, potentially, block legitimate email. Blacklists are not foolproof. There are two types of IP address: Dynamic - changes every time you connect to the Internet. Most commonly used for dialup Internet access. Spammers love these because they’re very hard to track and 100% disposable. Fixed/Static - All websites, most large companies and some individuals use fixed IP addresses. This can cause huge problems if they’re reported for pamming. When an IP address (dynamic or fixed ) is reported for sending spam it’s added to a blacklist. There are three different types of blacklists: Temporary An IP address placed on a temporary blacklist will have email coming from that IP address blocked for several hours. After a few hours the offending IP address is removed from the blacklist. Permanent When an IP address is added to a permanent blacklist any email server configured to block email from this list will never receive email from that range of IP addresses again. Comprehensive This is the most damaging of blacklists. Not only does it block a single IP address it also blocks the IP addresses next to it. For example if the IP address 192.156.66.67 was added to a comprehensive blacklist then all IP addresses close to 192.156.66.67 will also be blocked. This can be a huge problem for those website owners using virtual hosting because if your host has ever appeared on a blacklist then you’re also on the same blacklist, by default, because of the shared hosting from the same IP range. It’s important for all website owners to check whether or not they’re on a blacklist. You’ll need your IP address (available from your webhost) and you can check your blacklist status at: www.mail-abuse.org/cgi-bin/lookup Blacklists are a necessary evil due to the volume of spam being sent each day but are not an exact science. Take a few moments from your day and ensure that your website or email address is not being blocked. About the Author Filed under: Email Spam Comments: None |
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Posted on 03.21.06 by Admin @ 1:54 am
Methods to Fight Spam!!! by Wendy Fighting Spam.. Industry experts estimate that three out of every five e-mail messages that are sent today are spam. This is not only a nuisance; it is costing us all time and money which could be better spent on productive ventures. Bizwala is committed to fighting spam & blocks a great deal without customer intervention. Our systems are updated daily and we are always working to improve our spam filtering. Though we may never be able to block it all, we can offer some suggestions to combat spam effectively. Q: How can I prevent spam from reaching my e-mail account? A: People who send spam compile their mailing lists in many ways. Methods to compile such lists include: Sending spam to e-mail addresses that are most commonly used. A common tactic consists of building lists of targeted addresses that use frequently used words such as “webmaster” or “info” (for example, “webmaster@mydomainname” or “info@mydomainname”). Obtaining e-mail addresses that are automatically “harvested” from web sites by specialized software. Compiling lists of e-mail addresses that are either chosen or generate at random (for example, ” joe1@mydomainname”, “joe2@mydomainname” or “joe3@mydomainname”. This method is becoming increasingly frequent. Because spammers often send spam to undefined e-mail aliases such as aabbcc@domain.com, ccddee@domain.com, mfrds@domain.com, you can combat the receipt of spam effectively by not using a catch-all address . (The catch-all is an alias that is used to recieve mail sent to undefined addresses/aliases .) Q: What is spoofing and how can I fight it? A: “Spoofing” occurs when a spammer uses some version of your domain name in the “From” address field. Spammers use spoofing to try to hide their identities and to pass blame for spam to innocent Internet users. The large amount of spam messages — many of which are sent to invalid address — result in a significant amount of “bounced” e-mail (that is, mail that returned as being undeliverable). Unfortunately, bounced mail is sent back to the address found in the “From” line of the spammed message. Typically, the “From” line is also an undefined e-mail address not found in your mail settings. To combat receiving bounced mail messages, you can use the “devnull” alias that we mentioned in the previous question and answer. Q: Even if my account is not generating any spam, can the mail server I use get blocked because of spam? Unfortunately, yes. The main cause for blacklisting your mail server depends on where the spammed e-mail is ultimately received and how the ISP who maintains that location reacts to spam and to spam complaints. Many account holders with Bizwala forward e-mail messages that are sent to there hosting account. For example, a message sent to info@mydomainname could be forwarded to myaccount@aol.com or myaccount@yahoo.com. At other times, clients may be forwarding e-mail messages to accounts that are invalid or otherwise not in use. The processing of the forwarded e-mail message is handled by the mail server that your account uses (specifically, the MTA or Mail Transport Agent). Because a Bizwala mail server is the MTA, it is possible that the mail server could be blacklisted even though you (or any other Bizwala client) is not responsible for sending the spam in the first place. In short, you must be careful about where you forward e-mail, how you report spam, and to whom you report it. Note: Bizwala reserves the right to terminate a client’s services for violations of our Acceptable Use policy. Unacceptable use includes forwarding e-mail messages to addresses that are invalid (not within the client’s control) and/or sending mail with malicious intent. Q: How can I filter spam in my Inbox once I receive it? First, do NOT click any links in the spam or try to reply or unsubscribe to the spammed e-mail message. Often, these links will subscribe you to even more spam lists despite the fact that those links appear to promise that you will be unsubscribed. And, as spammers are always looking for legitimate e-mail addresses to spam, replying to a spam message in any way only tells the spammer that your e-mail address is valid. Second, some e-mail programs have built-in functionality that deals with spam that reaches your Inbox. Outlook 2000 (and newer) is one such a e-mail program. Outlook creates a folder called Junk Mail, where you can move junk e-mail and then review it before deleting. Or, you can have junk e-mail delivered to your Inbox, but color-coded so you can easily identify it. The list of terms that Outlook uses to filter suspected junk e-mail messages is found in a file named Filters.txt. You can also filter messages based on the e-mail addresses of junk and adult content senders, allowing you to move or delete all future messages from a particular sender. You can review the Junk Senders list and add and remove e-mail addresses from it. If you do not use Outlook 2000 or higher, please refer to your mail program’s help files for any information related to spam filtering. Q: Are there any low cost programs out there that I can install to help filter the spam? A: Yes. There are many programs available that use a variety of methods to help e-mail end users filter spam. Effective spam prevention should include client-side software (that is, software that is installed on your local computer). Below are some links that you may want to visit: Cloudmark Safety Bar: http://www.cloudmark.com Realize that there are many products on the market that you can install on help filter spam. However, as we are not affiliated with the vendors or authors of those products, we cannot specify which of those products would work best for your specific situation. We ask that you “do your research” in order to locate which product is best for you. Q: The spam that is reaching me is being sent to defined e-mail accounts. What can I do about it? A: If any of your defined e-mail addresses are receiving too many spam messages, it may be well worth it to you to change your e-mail address. For example, if “info@mydomainname” is the recipient of too much spam, it may be a good idea to delete “info@mydomainname” in favor of “information@mydomainname. We realize that this may be a tough decision, but such an action could be a huge benefit as it would immediately reduce — if not entirely eliminate — the amount of spam that you would be receiving at your e-mail address. Q: How can I prevent my e-mail address from being added to spammer’s mailing lists? A: As mentioned above, spammers use a variety of methods to compile lists. We have created a help document that will give you some useful tips about how to prevent your e-mail addresses from being added to lists. Protect Your Privacy If you plan to enter your information to any Web site, please review the Terms of Service and Privacy Policies of the Web site. If the policies do not clearly indicate what will be done with your information, you should reconsider posting any details to that Web site. Publishing Your E-mail Address on Your Web Site Instead of having a simple “mailto” link on your Web site, such as “Please e-mail me at joe@example.com,” consider using an approved form mail script that allows Web site visitors to fill out a form to send you e-mail. Bizwala offers such a script free of charge. This will help prevent e-mail address harvesting robots and other spammers from capturing your address. email support@bizwala.net if you need assistance in setting up a spam deterrent form mail Member Profiles Try to stay away from creating and posting a member profile, on any Web site, for others to see publicly. Spammers are always reviewing such information for new e-mail addresses. Product Registration Many of us register products online. Many times the product registration form has options pre-selected that enable the company to solicit you by e-mail, even though you may not want it. Be sure to review the options you are selecting and any options that may have been selected for you by default. Posting to a Newsgroup Never post anything to a newsgroup with your real e-mail address. Consider cloaking the address or using a “disposable” e-mail address. Consider creating and using an e-mail address from one of the free e-mail address providers. Do Not Reply to Spam or an Unsubscribe Request Never reply to a piece of spam or request to be unsubscribed. Your reply confirms that your address is working and provides the spammer the opportunity to add your address to their list or sell it to another entity. This actually helps facilitate more spam. Report Spam An effective way to help prevent spam is to report it to the ISP or mail administrator where the spam originated. Such reports help ISPs to identify the user or users who sent the spam. Report the spam, including full headers from the spam, to the ISP abuse department or postmaster e-mail address. Federal law strictly limits the information that online service providers may disclose about their users. However, e-mail messages do contain some information about the sender. E-mail headers contain an Internet Protocol (IP) address that corresponds to the sender’s Internet service provider (ISP). A line in the e-mail message contains an 8 to 12 digit number, separated by periods. For example: “Received: from [123.456.78.91] by . . .” The “123.456.78.91″ represents the ISP’s unique IP address for the sender. Most spam headers have multiple “Received: from” lines. If the e-mail message has not been forged then, in general, the first such line from the bottom is the true origin of the spammed message. After you identify the IP address, you can search to determine which ISP provides this person with Internet access. A Web site that attempts to determine the actual computer with that IP address is located at http://www.arin.net/whois/index.html -Article written by Wendy Jo McLeod Spam solution providers Filed under: Email Spam Comments: None |
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Posted on 03.21.06 by Admin @ 1:53 am
The Reliability of Spam Filters by David Simon The only way to keep up with the latest about The Reliability Spam Filters is to constantly stay on the lookout for new information. If you read everything you find about The Reliability Spam Filters, it won’t take long for you to become an influential authority. Spam filters supposedly stop spam ,ails, phishing mails, which are another type of spam that comes through the mailbox, but pose more of a risk than other types of spam email. Thus, if a phishing email comes to your in inbox and you provide the sender with your information, you have put yourself at a high risk of having your identity stolen. This means that you must avoid these emails at all costs. Internet service providers today claim to place high-security on their services. However, AOL, Comcast, Verizon and other services probably have less security than you might believe especially with their default settings. If you don’t have accurate details regarding The Reliability Spam Filters, then you might make a bad choice on the subject. Don’t let that happen: keep reading. The fact is that spam emails and phishing emails especially put the account holder at risk. The phishing mails are worse because they appear to come from account providers, such as banks, internet service providers and businesses. Thus, avoiding these mails at all cost is part of filtering your mail. While AOL has a spam filter integrated into its server, it still does not have the power to stop the perpetrators completely if you fail to do so yourself, you could end up at high-risk of having your identity stolen. If you think you have problems now just sorting through and deleting those emails, just think of how much more trouble you will have if you ever accidently answer one. You will have to contact credit bureaus, cancel credit cards, and withdraw money from your bank accounts. Thus, the ultimate filter for reducing and getting rid of spam or phishing emails is either to not answer them at all or to remit a blank email to the sender. Spam email filters may seem highly reliable, but do not misunderstand that to mean that you now have the freedom to open anything in your inbox without any scrutiny. Always take the time to sort and separate your mail. Is there really any information about The Reliability Spam Filters that is nonessential? We all see things from different angles, so something relatively insignificant to one may be crucial to another. About the Author Filed under: Email Spam Comments: None |
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Posted on 03.21.06 by Admin @ 1:53 am
Strategies To Fight Email Spam If you are a business owner and you rely on email, spam is going to be a major concern. How you address it can make a big difference in employee efficiency. Email spam has been a nuisance and has gotten even worse over the last several years. Email spam slows down server performance and can eat away at storage. Cleaning all those bad messages out of your inbox is time consuming. The easiest way for viruses to spread is via email. Having a strategy to deal with email spam and viruses threats is essential for any business to survive and be productive. You can limit the negative impact to your business by having policies and guidelines in place. Tips to avoid getting email spam: If you have a company web site, use a contact form that the web site visitor can fill out. Some spam mers use robots that crawl web pages looking for email addresses. Your web site designer should be able to help you with this. When signing up for forums, products and services use a free email or throwaway account like hotmail or Yahoo mail. When signing up for offers be careful what boxes you check although technically not spam you may get a lot of email offers you do not want. Never reply to an email spam message, this just lets them know that your account is active. You may want to use a throwaway email address if you post on newsgroups or forums. These measures may help to reduce spam, but if you have an old email address you may want to change your email address or deploy a spam filter system. There are several choices for anti spam systems you could buy software that runs locally on your PC to filter the spam, but this can be expensive, does not prevent virus infection, and is not a good choice in a networked environment. Managing individual machine spam software is inefficient. If you have limited technical resources you can outsource you email spam filtering to a hosted anti spam and virus solution provider. Spam filter service providers colocate their spam and virus filters in data centers with redundant power and network connections. You will need to change your mail exchanger on your dns servers to point to the service providers spam filters. Your service provider will then scrub your email for spam and viruses. They then forward your email to your mail server minus the spam and viruses. This gives you a few extra layers of protection. In the event of a network outage or server downtime your email is held and is delivered when the network or your server is available minus the virus and spam. Spam filter services also scan for viruses; this adds another layer of defense to the virus software already running on your network. If you have an organization with more than one hundred email boxes investing in your own spam filter appliance is the most cost effective solution if you have the technical expertise to manage the system. A spam appliance sits in front of your email server and blocks spam and viruses. The price of the spam appliance will depend upon your number of users, amount of mail and storage requirements. Fighting spam is no longer be a losing battle if you have a good strategy to deal with the threat. About the Author Filed under: Email Spam Comments: None |
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Posted on 03.21.06 by Admin @ 1:52 am
How DO Spammers Get Your Email Address? How DO Spammers Get Your Email Address? As much as I try to stem the seemingly endless flow of spam, the crap just keeps arriving my Inbox. For example, this week I received “New affiliate programs from 2004-02-10 to 2004-02-14 :: Subscription from http://WeAreBlahBlahBlah.net”. I’d never heard of WeAreBlahBlahBlah.net, let alone subscribed to the newsletter. But the address used explained exactly how the spammer reached me. I’ve set up numerous ’special’ addresses for customers, affiliates, subscribers, merchant partners and others. For example, if I join XYZ’s affiliate program, I might set up XYZ@nptinfo.com and give that address to them to contact me. If I suddenly start to receive spam at that address, then I know EXACTLY who the ‘leaky’ culprit is. Here are other ways spammers get your address. Web Pages Spammers use scavenger bots, programs that ‘harvest’ email addresses contained in “mailto:” HTML tags. Those are clickable email links that open your email program with the address already placed in the “To” field. Web Forms Some sites request various details via forms, e.g. guest books & registration forms. Spammers get email addresses from these because the form is publicly available on the web, or because the webmaster sells the list. Paper (Offline) Forms Some companies sell lists of addresses obtained from convention participants or contest entrants. Whois Searches Unless the domain registrant has paid an additional fee to make their registration private, a simple Whois lookup reveals the registrant’s address. Although most registrars have enhanced the security of their WHOIS databases, by requiring a special code be entered before information is displayed, many spammers take the time and trouble to grab addresses this way. From Web Browsers Some sites use various tricks to extract a surfer’s email address from the web browser, sometimes without the surfer noticing it. Chat Rooms This is another major source of email addresses for spammers, especially as this is one of the first public activities newbies join, making it easy for spammers to harvest ‘fresh’ addresses. Sending Test Messages Have you ever sent a message to an invalid address? You get an ‘undeliverable’ or ‘failure’ notice back. Some spammers use this to guess email addresses by sending test messages to a list of made-up or guessed addresses. They know they’ve got good addresses for those that did not result in failure messages. Online Yellow Pages What could be more alluring to a spammer than a directory of names and email addresses filed by category? Chain Letters These are ingenious. I tell five friends, and my friends each tell five of their friends, and so on and so forth. The email addresses all build up in the cc field and are a spammers delight. Buying Lists Spammers buy lists of email addresses usually passed off as those belonging to people who opted-in to to obtain information in a specific category. Let’s put spammers out of business. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Use ‘throw-away’ addresses whenever you’re not sure of the source, and don’t sign up unless there are clear ‘Privacy’ statements on the site. If worse comes to worse, and you’re fighting your way through a mountain of spam, install anti-spam software on your computer. © Copyright Rosalind Gardner, All Rights Reserved. Article by Rosalind Gardner, author of the best-selling “Super Affiliate Handbook: How I Made $436,797 in One Year Selling Other People’s Stuff Online”. To learn how you too can suceed in Internet and affiliate marketing, go to: http://hop.clickbank.net/?nathanoct/webvista2 About the Author Rosalind Gardner is one of the top affiliate marketers in the world. In January 1997, Rosalind Gardner received her first ‘web check’ and hasn’t looked back since. Trading her career as an air traffic controller for full-time netpreneurship in early 2000, her various internet projects now entertain and inform millions of visitors annually. She offers this article with YOU in mind, knowing that if she can earn a good living online, YOU can too. Filed under: Email Spam Comments: None |
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External News Email Spam News News on Email Spam continually updated from thousands of sources around the net. Internet Spam From Industrial Networks? It's Possible Internet bad guys might be able to use industrial networks as remote terminals to send unsolicited e-mails known as spam and launch attacks against other computer systems. Yonkers Main Street Mural Project The Yonkers Downtown Waterfront BID in partnership with Rising DevelopmentYonkers, LLC and with the support of the Blue Door Artist Association is sponsoring the creation of murals in Downtown Yonkers that will ... The new multiple faces of Internet threats These days, it's your browser that has online criminals salivating. Network worms and viruses spread by mass e-mails are unlikely to ever become extinct, but they are no longer the primary weapon used by the ... |
