Spam: Origin and Effects |
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| Author:
| DevilsX
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| Submitted: |
13-Jul-2004 22:15:48 |
| Imported From: |
zZine (original author: DevilsX)
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Have you ever wasted half of your time online sorting through useless ads and emails that turn out to be nothing more than false claims? This report will fill you in with details that might help save you time, and protect your privacy.
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Have you ever wasted half of your time online sorting through useless ads and emails that turn out to be nothing more than false claims? Have you ever wondered how you get them and where they came from? This report will fill you in with details that might help save you time, and protect your privacy.
Spam is the equivalence of telemarketing calls it is a nuisance, if not more, to the recipients. Spam includes but not limited to the solicitation of questionable products designed to give immediate and effective results. It might be products such as weight loss pills, enlargement of certain parts of the body, cheap and reliable services, or other unapproved medical products, most of which are non-existence and are
not what they claimed to be.
Spam targets you in a variety of ways on the web, but mostly by using your email account(s) as a destination source. Most solicitors use software known as "crawlers" to capture email addresses that are listed in public directories, online communities, contests or sweepstakes, and anywhere else that you have revealed your contact information to. The crawlers then forward those addresses to random misconfigured mail servers, or their own internal ones. Their private oens are designed to hide their sources, and have the ability to mass produce and send spam to every address they have acquired.
Aside from the crawling method, generating email addresses are pretty simple to accomplish. The process starts with generating random addresses in alphabetical and numerical order, so chances are if your email starts with A, you'll be the first on the list. Morality is a price to pay when it comes to profit, some spammers would also break into the mailing servers mentioned earlier, to sniff out the log files that might contain addresses.
Spammers are not especially truthful about their return addresses, let
alone their names. You might have seen spam that came with a strange
message line like "agdjhd;." These are hardly typos; in fact, they're there to fool email servers into believing that they are genuine, because the servers assume that if all the subject lines are the same on every single email from a specific destination, they are most likely spam. Yes, they are very sneaky indeed. But the trick doesn't end there. Have ever been in a situation where they will leave you a link that promises to unsubscribe you?
Well, what it actually does is confirm to the spammers that you are a real person, allowing them to send you more unwanted ads.
Most web-based email services have some sort of filter that is able to sort out spam and automatically delete them or wait for the user to check and delete them manually. So far they have proven to do their job efficiently, but a little bit too efficient, as it turns out, legitimate emails are often found mistakenly along with spam. On the other hand, special software applications designed to filter spam and shown to be quite effective, if you're willing to spend a little money.
Though spam isn't as big of a crime, a lot of annoyed recipients have brought it to the attention of Congress, hoping they could pass new amendments to outlaw spam. And recently Microsoft filed 15 lawsuits against spammers in Washington, marking another battle in the fight against this digital invasion.
Although spam maybe a nuisance to most, some have stated that it might contain useful tidbits that are not available offline or in most
billboards. Whether or not spam is your enemy or your opportunistic friend, choose your side wisely, you?ll never know when your privacy (and leisure) is threatened.
Stay tuned for upcoming reports on how to effectively
block spam.
This article was originally published by CyberArmy.net in the CyberArmy Library.
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