What is it? How to prevent?

E-MAIL SPAM
 

These days everyone knows well about Virus and Spywares. But most of the people who are new to the world of inetrnet or email commonly doesn't know about spam, and what is it about. But they may have heard the word "spam".

Spam is somekinds of e-mail sent by untrusted or unrelated senders. It increases the load on mail servers, fills up your mail box and wastes your time and there by does financial harms.

Most spam is commercial advertisement, often for dubious products, "get-rich-quick" schemes, or "quasi-legal" services. Or someone even expect nothing from that otherthan flooding the internet and wasting the mail user's valuable times. Email spam targets individual users with direct mail messages. Email spam lists are often created by scanning Usenet postings, stealing Internet mailing lists, or searching the Web for addresses. Spams typically cost users money out-of-pocket to receive. Many people, anyone with measured phone service, read or receive their mail while the meter is running, so to speak. Spam costs them additional money. On top of that, it costs money for ISPs and online services to transmit spam, and these costs are transmitted directly to subscribers.

Spam statistics

Growth of E-Mail Spam since 1978

•  1978 - An e-mail spam is sent to 600 addresses.
  
•  1994 - First large-scale spam sent to 6000  newsgroups, reaching millions of people.
  
•  2005 - (June) 30 billion per day
  
•  2006 - (June) 55 billion per day
  
•  2006 - (December) 85 billion per day 
  
•  2007 - (February) 90 billion per day

• 
  MAAWG estimates that 80-85% of incoming mail is "Spam email", as of the last quarter of 2005. The sample size for the MAAWG's study was over 100 million mailboxes.
  
• Jef Poskanzer, owner of the domain name acme.com, was receiving over one million spam emails per day.

How to be safe?

• Do not share your email address with everyone
  
• Be awre of opening emails with attachements that you received from unknown senders.
  
• See if your Internet Service Provider has built-in spam-fighting software
  
• Mask email address when publishing them on websites.
   for example write "william@onedomain.com"  as "william at onedomain dot com" or "w i l l i a m at o n e d o m a i n dot c o m" or something that are not able to be read by aoutomated email harvesting softwares.
  
• use images to display email address
  
•  When you purchase items from Web sites or subscribe to newsletters, make sure that the site's privacy policy states that it won't share or sell your email address with any other company or person
  
•  If you need a temporary email adress, create a self-destructing disposable email account with the Spam Gourmet  service. Use it anywhere, where you wanted to give your email address. It will protect your original email address by forwarding the only the specified number of emails to your accounts. For more information on it go to http://www.spamgourmet.com.
  
• Make it as a policy to never do business with any services or companies that arrive by spam. If we all did this, spam would disappear from the Internet.
  
• Don't respond to spam to complain or to get yourself off their mailing list. Your response can be used to identify yours as an active email account holder. Your response could therefore get you even more spam!
  
• Use anti spam softwares or webmail accounts such as gmail.
   Gmail has better protection against spam. It has easily managble spam settings as well.

What to do if you get spamed?

1. Delete and ignore it.
   
2. Filter the mailing address which you are getting spam mails from
   
3. Complain to the spammer's Internet Service Provider (ISP), but make sure you know how to read headers, so you're complaining to the right person.
    Forward the message with full headers to abuse@ or postmaster@ followed by the ISP's domain.
   
4. Report it to abuse@ucdavis.edu.
    Forward the message with full headers to abuse@ucdavis.edu.

Take a deep breath and avoid getting too worked up about spam. Use your wits to do what you can to avoid it, and then move on. Avoid spending an obsessive amount of time campaigning against unsolicted email or demanding that someone do something about it. Do support your ISP in its efforts to crack down on spammers and cooperate in any investigations that you can. And, definitely don't send spam yourself!

Resources
http://www.spamgourmet.com
http://ittimes.ucdavis.edu
http://spam.abuse.net
http://digital.net
http://www.december.com/web