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Everything you
always wanted to know about spam and anti-spam control but were afraid
to ask
Remember back in the 80's when email was catching on? When you got
an email, it was exciting right? By the early 90's email was starting
to become a necessary communcation medium for both home and business.
Used properly, email can increase productivity as well as save money
by cutting down on telephone calls and fax machine time.
Then SPAM started becoming a problem. Email boxes were filling up with
all sorts or garbage from MLM schemes, to drug purchases and pornographic
images. It is now not uncommon for an email account to be hit with a
hundred or more SPAMS each day.
Now, according to INIC , companies
will lose more than $20 billion in lost productivity because of SPAM
and home consumers are increasingly wary of letting their children use
email.
What is spam?
Spam is defined as email from a sender who floods the Internet with
many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message
on people who would not otherwise see it, much like "junk mail". Most
spam is commercial advertising, some legitimate but often for dubious
products, get-rich-quick schemes, and pornographic sites. Spam costs
the sender very little to send.
Email spam targets individual users with direct mail messages. Email
spam lists are often created by scanning postings, stealing Internet
mailing lists, or searching the Web.
In a survey by consumer reports ( September 2004) www.consumerreports.org
, they found:
• 64 percent of those surveyed had detected a virus
in the past two years and more than 12 percent had found a virus
10 or more times
• 36 percent had their web browsers home page changed
or hijacked
• 1 percent had lost between $100 and $1000
• 27 percent said SPAM had changed their use of the Internet
• 38 percent said they had curt down on email use
• 30 percent said they shopped online less
Problems SPAM causes
A few people actually enjoy reading SPAM much like some enjoy reading
junk mail. However, there are several problems SPAM causes:
- The receiver and the systems are the one who pay for it.
E-mail spam is unique in that the sender pays very little
to send spam and once they set it up, takes very little time out of
their day. However, some email accounts still are on "metered" ISP's
(AOL). Even if you are on an unmetered account, the time lost deleting
spam costs the most in lost productivity. An increasing number of
spammers, send most or all of their mail via innocent ISP systems,
to avoid blocks that many systems have placed against mail coming
directly from the spammers' systems. This fills the ISP systems' networks
with unwanted spam messages, takes up their managers' time dealing
with all the undeliverable spam messages, and subjects them to complaints
from recipients who conclude that since the ISP delivered the mail,
they must be in league with the spammers.
Many others use ``hit and run'' spamming in which they get a trial
account at an ISP for a short time, send thousands of messages, and
quits only when the provider figures out what they are doing and cancels
it. Spammers doing this over and over force the ISP to waste staff time
both on the cleanup and on monitoring their trial accounts for abuse.
- Most SPAM is either garbage, fraudulent or pornographic.
Almost without exception SPAM advertises stuff that's worthless,
deceptive, or entirely fraudulent. It's all stuff that's worthless
advertising in any medium where they'd actually have to pay the cost
of the ads. Since the cost of spamming is so low, SPAMMERS can send
the ads to everyone, increasing the junk we have to deal with.
- Remove Me!: Spams invariably say they'll remove
names on request, but they almost never do. Spammers know that people
don't want to hear from them, and generally put fake return addresses
on their messages so that they don't have to bear the cost of receiving
responses from people to whom they've send messages. It's hard to
think of another line of business where the general ethical level
is so low. Don't waste your time trying to jump through the spammers'
hoops. Plenty of people have documented the fact that not only do
remove lists not work, they verify to the spammer that your e-mail
address is good, and so then they sell it to the next spammer for
even more money.
- New Threats - Newer threats which come from
spam cause even more damage. "Phishing" attempts to gain access to
your financial information. Sneaky programs called spyware can watch
your every keystroke and capture passwords.
What is being doing about SPAM?
On January 1,2004, a federal law went into effect "supposedly" regulating
junk e-mail. It is called the CAN-SPAM act or Controlling the Assault
of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act. This has resulted in
little prosecutions or slow down of SPAM. In fact, SPAM seems to be
increasing incrementally.
In another survey by consumer reports ( September 2004) www.consumerreports.org
, they found:
-- 69 percent of those surveyed said HALF of their e-mail was
SPAM
-- 55 percent said they had received pornographic or objectionable
materail
-- Almost 10 percent of those with children at home said those
children had seen pornographic material in SPAM!
The bottom line is the consumer has to protect him or herself!
So there are two possible approaches:
Anti-Spam Filters
Filtering and filter programs are a computing technique to try and
decipher unwanted from wanted e-mail. Most filters can work well to
stop messages with bad key words and such. The average filter seems
to stop about 60% of SPAM.
The problems with filters is that they are reactive. Spammers can
exploit this by probing current filters and finding ways to machine
generate messages that make it through the filter. If the filter is
"set too tight", important non-SPAM is filtered out. The user is then
left to go through the SPAM file to see if there are any good messages
in there thus defeating the purpose.
The Challenge-Response Technique
This is the system used by GoodbyeSpam. And we explain why it's better
in our section called How
It Works.
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