Junk e-mail, or spam has become the scourge of the modern computer world .Spam is like a disease it does not care about sex, age, tribe, race religion or wealth. It does not discriminate. Spam affects all of us.
Spam is flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it. Most spam is commercial advertising, often for dubious products, get-rich-quick schemes, or quasi-legal services. Spam costs the sender very little to send -- most of the costs are paid for by the recipient or the carriers rather than by the sender.
According to wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages, which are generally undesired. While the most widely recognized form of spam is email spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, mobile phone messaging spam, internet forum spam and junk fax transmissions. Spam is also called junk mail. Some email clients or servers have spam filters, which try to delete or move the spam messages.
One particularly nasty variant of email spam is sending spam to mailing lists (public or private email discussion forums.) Because many mailing lists limit activity to their subscribers, spammers will use automated tools to subscribe to as many mailing lists as possible, so that they can grab the lists of addresses, or use the mailing list as a direct target for their attacks.
It is said the typical profile of a spammer is as follows: Male 18-30 years of age, single, technically competent and with little regard to his status as a public nuisance. There are female spammers out there, but unfortunately, this is predominantly a male preserve.
The are many tools available to the spam merchant,. The main ones are CD lists, email extractors, news group harvesters. E-mail extractors are programs which wander around the internet gathering e-mail addresses from web sites and web based forums. A good extractor can gather 20,000 email addresses per hour.
Spammers are “entrepreneurs” or at least they like to think of themselves as such, guess they are like some of the so called Ugandan investors. The vast majority of those involved in the spam business are self employed and work at home. Sending spam is almost the ideal home based business. You name your hours and the business itself is virtually automatic. In other words, its maximum gain from minimum effort.
The motivation for most spammers is money. Considerable amounts of cash, actually each spammer who sends out one million junk e-mails is certain of approximately 200 sales. Many of the products they sell are worth approximately $100 to $200 to them in commission, far better than our kabagala(pancake) “investors”.
Shocking, the average spammer can earn in excess of $200,000 per year. Maximum return for minimum effort.
The best technology that is currently available to stop spam is spam filtering software. The simplest filters use keywords such as "sex,", "xxx," "viagra," etc., in the subject line to attempt to identify and delete spam. These simple filters are easy to sidestep by spelling "sex" as "s-e-x." There are, of course, thousands of ways to spell "sex" if you are willing to add extra characters like that, and it is difficult for the simple filters to keep up. Also, simple filters are most likely to block "real" e-mail that you do want to receive. For example, if your friend sends you his favorite recipe for baked chicken breasts, the filter blocks the e-mail because of the word "breasts."
More advanced filters, known as heuristic filters and Bayesian filters, try to take this simple approach quite a bit further to statistically identify spam based on word patterns or word frequency. But there are still ways to get around them (mainly by using short messages).
Large ISPs tried blocking multiple e-mails with the same subject line or message body. This had the unwanted side-effect of blocking e-mail newsletters, so ISPs made "white lists" to identify legitimate newsletter senders. Then spammers sidestepped the issue by inserting different random characters into each subject line and message body. That's why you get e-mail messages with subject lines like: Women Wanted puklq
The word "puklq" is random, and it is different on every e-mail the spammer sends.
The final front in the war on spam is the elimination of e-mail in the traditional sense. Many businesses are being forced to take this approach. Even HowStuffWorks has been forced to use forms. It used to be that you could send e-mail directly to individual HowStuffWorks staff and departments, but those e-mail addresses started to receive so much spam that they now use a set of online forms, instead. That may be what happens to all e-mail in the long run. The amount of spam, and the inability to control that spam, may become so unmanageable that the traditional e-mail system we know today collapses and gets replaced either with forms or with a set of advanced, secure servers that put spammers out of business
