All About AntiSpam Software

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. 

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.

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Legislative measures failed stop Spam up till now. Since Spam is basically a human problem you can do something about it using anti-spam technology. Anti-spam software is the only thing we have now to block undesired messages. It’s not a foolproof method however. Let’s see why.

Most anti-spam software use inspection techniques to detect Spam emails. The anti-spam program analyzes incoming messages and checks the message content against a known profile of Spam. Something like it asks a question “Does this message look as Spam?”, and based on that analysis the anti-spam program takes the final decision to allow the message or block it. At best this approach can delete most of the Spam emails allowing only a few ones getting through.

The analysis method is not as reliable as it seems. If you slacken the rules, you’ll get much Spam in your inbox. If the rules are too strict, you’ll stop all the Spam with the risk to block quite legitimate messages. A legitimate email incorrectly blocked as spam is called a false positive. If you get a lot of false positives, you will need to read all the Spam emails looking for good messages among the rubbish. But this completely disproves the need of anti-spam software.

The main disadvantage of the analysis method is that the filters that work fine today can stop working tomorrow. Spammers can also try an anti-spam program to tailor their emails so that they will get around the filters. As far as the developers improve their anti-spam programs, the spammers perfect their spam techniques. That’s why we get V1agra and C1alis and many other misspelled words in spam emails. Certain sophisticated techniques allow spammers make an email message that looks differently to a human person than the same message is read by a computer program, for example, when an email contains a text readable for the recipient but the program sees it as a picture. Such kind of spam emails is growing in popularity for spammers now.

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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.