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About Spam Spam: what is it, why it's there, why it's bad, and how to deal with it The purpose of this article is to raise user awareness for spam, provide information about its dangers, and offer solutions to individual users, organizations and mail server administrators to significantly decrease spam volumes. This article is not particularly technical. Instead, it aims to give answers to the everyday user about main spam issues. We will be delighted to receive comments about this article. Email Us. We will also be happy if you send this article to your friends. For proper disclosure, we (Migvan Effect) provide email and email spam filtering to organizations. For information about filtering services click here. At the end of this article there are links and information about our services. What Is Spam? Unsolicited mail, better known worldwide as "spam", is mail sent to a large number of recipients without their request or consent. What Is Email Spam? On the web, junk e-mail, unsolicited e-mail or "spam" refers to a mass distribution of e-mail messages, sent to hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of recipients, without their request or consent. Spamming = sending spam. Spammers = people who send spam. What's inside Spam? Spam messages usually include advertizing. Sometimes they include false information, designed to fraud the recipient. All kinds of advertisements can be included in spam, but the following content is especially prevalent: drugs and medications (particularly Viagra and similar), low-cost mortgages, adult content, gambling, stock exchange scams, fad diets, and sales of various products. Why do Spammers Spam? For money. Spam volumes grow every year because spam works for spammers. Spam allows distributing mail to a huge number of recipients at virtually no cost. Spammers assume that even if a fraction of their recipients respond to an offering, it is still enough to make significant profits. How does Spam Cause Harm? Spam constitutes 40-70% of all email traffic. This is harmful in several ways: Home users waste time downloading email and sorting through messages. Also, minors are exposed to adult content. Users in the workplace waste precious time sorting valid messages from the spam, which usually constitutes most of the email. Business organizations lose productivity. Studies show that the annual cost of productivity lost to spam is over 10 billion dollars in the Internet service providers and mail server administrators must invest in infrastructure to heavy mail traffic, most of which is spam. . They have to increase bandwidth, upgrade software and hardware, and increase mailbox storage space. Is Spam Dangerous? Yes! Spam results in financial loss and exposes you to undesirable content, but also entails more tangible dangers. Junk emails often include executable files (Trojan horses). Activating these files gives spammers direct access to recipients' computers. Even just opening spam is dangerous. Spam messages often link to websites with tempting offers. Visitors on those websites must provide personal information, including credit card and bank information, personal address, etc. Disclosing this kind of information to the wrong persons is not safe, and exposes you to a variety of scams, hoaxes and violation of privacy. Why Can't We Stop Spammers? Many countries don't have clear laws about spamming. In countries that do, enforcement is difficult for several reasons: The number of spammers is very big. The origin of spam is extremely difficult to trace. Anyone can open a free email account, spam, close the account, and then open a new account elsewhere or with a new service provider. Email senders don't have to identify themselves, and use any computer with Internet access. Sophisticated spammers can completely conceal the origin of spam, making it look like it came from a reliable source (e.g. billgates@microsoft.com) Enforcement resources will never be enough to prevent and stop spam. What Should I Do with Spam? Delete, delete, delete! Do nothing else! And Yet, What Shouldn't I Do with Spam? Don’t open spam at all. If a file is attached to the email, don't open or activate it. Never reply to spam. Replying confirms to the sender that the email was read, so spam will be sent to you over and over. Never click on any link in a spam email. Don't click "Remove" or similar. This too can expose you to receiving more and more spam to your inbox. How to Reduce or Prevent Spam? What Everybody Can Do Use the filter settings included in most email programs. Filters are only partly effective, but a user can, for instance, determine that any e-mail with the word "diet" or "Viagra" doesn't reach the inbox. Outlook junk-email filters: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA010450041033.aspx Outlook express junk e-mail filters: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/community/columns/junkmail.mspx Thunderbird users enjoy more advanced filtering options. The programs flags spam, allows users to mark spam and unmark messages that were flagged as spam by mistake. The system learns what the user considers spam. A user can automatically delete spam or move it to a junk folder, where messages are reviewed and filtered. This method doesn't eliminate all spam, but it definitely reduces volumes. Thunderbird spam options and junk mail controls: http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/spam-howto.html http://kb.mozillazine.org/Junk_Mail_Controls Use Gmail to filter email, even if inbox is not Gmail (not checked by Migvan): http://mboffin.com/post.aspx?id=1636 http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1871058,00.asp Note: this seems to work well now, but Google may decide to block the option in the future. Gmail Yahoo Mail. What Home Users Can Do If you use a free web mail, make sure it includes email filters. Most services like Gmail and Yahoo Mail do. If your service doesn't include filters, it's time to look for a new one. If your email address was provided by your ISP, you can purchase an email filtering service. All ISP's provide this service for a monthly fee. This is not always cheap, but it is rather effective. What Organizations with their own Domain Can Do There are many solutions for organizations, depending on infrastructures, the organization's ability to manage sophisticate system, and on budget. There are usually two kinds of solutions: Filtering messages on the mail server. Filtering messages before they get to the server. The first solution entails installing software on the organizational server. All email messages are then filtered on that server. The market offers a large variety of solutions for different kinds of servers, which we cannot cover in this article. The main downside of this solution is that all mail reaches the organization's server, sometimes the organizational network as well. End-user spam may be reduced, but traffic to the server and burden on the network are still heavy. The second solution involves using an external system to filter email before it arrives into the organization's server. The external system is usually located in the facilities of a filtering provider, performing all filtering tasks for the organization. Only clean mail reaches the organization's servers. We present here our solution to remote filtering services: Reflexion. How Reflextion Works: All mail sent to the organization's domain goes through the filtering system. If the system suspects that a message is spam, it flags and quarantines it. A daily report with a list of quarantined messages is emailed to every user. Users can access quarantine from the report, and unblock mail that was flagged as spam by mistake. Users can log into their personal account at any time to unblock mail. Reflexion Features Block junk-mail based on content (Anti Spam) Block viruses (Anti Virus) Prevent collecting organizational information by using "secure addresses" (Anti Phising) Filter emails on a remote external server; prevent overload, and DOS attacks on the organizational network. Create temporary addresses for special use and don't expose your real email. Prevent directory harvesting (using common email addresses to collect information about the organization). Quarantine junk mail. Unblock mail if not spam. Whitelist: list addresses that should never be filtered. End-user and administrator access from any web browser. A large variety of administration options. Low cost and huge savings on productivity. Reflexion Flow Chart http://www.reflexion.net/img/content-design/RTC4-Message_Flow.jpg Reflexion: Prices and Trial: http://www.migvan.co.il/english/info/products/antispam/antispam-001.htm If it's that simple, then what is the problem? Spam filters have two big issues: They don't eliminate spam. Spammers use various technologies to conceal spam, and filters often don't identify it. The older an email address, the more spam it gets. Filters eliminate 70-90% spam. This means that if you get 50 junk emails every day without a filter, you will still get 5-15 emails with a filter. Even the best filters make mistakes, giving a "false positive". This means that filters sometimes identify legitimate emails as spam. Recipients don't receive valid emails because they were erroneously filtered. Many users, not wanting to risk losing important emails, prefer handling lots of spam because of this problem. You can deal with false positives in any number of ways: Don't filter. Filter, but don't delete. Instead, forward to a junk folder, where you can review messages and unblock valid emails filtered by mistake. Use an external service that quarantines filtered email, and lets you release the false positives. Use an advanced system like Reflexion, allowing you also to mark false positives, so that email from this address is no longer erroneously identified as spam. This "whitelisint", or the creation of a list of valid emails, helps the system to learn, and prevents loss of important emails. |
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