Spamming

SPAM Definition:  Any received Message that is unwanted by the Recipient.  Unsolicitated Commercial Email (UCE) or defined as “Unwanted”, “inappropriate” and “no longer wanted” Email.  Real spam is generally e-mail advertising for some product sent to a mailing list or newsgroup. Spam as a problem and ways to counter problems: Spam may be defined as a problem due to following main Reasons described as under:  Cost Shifting : Sending bulk e-mail is amazingly cheap. With just a modem and a computer, spammers can send hundreds or thousands of messages per hour, and though that relatively minuscule cost of entry into the market is a potential advertiser’s dream, it quickly becomes a nightmare for those who pay the costs of receiving it. If the costs were as minimal as the energy expended in pressing one button, spam would not be a concern.  Fraud : In survey after survey, the overwhelming majority of Internet users dislike receiving spam. In response to such strong consumer opinion, many ISPs have taken a variety of costly steps to reduce the volume of spam transmitted through their systems, including the buildup of extra capacity to accommodate the demands of filtering and storing what represents, according to America Online, nearly 30 percent of its daily mail traffic. Knowing that ISPs have taken those measures, senders of junk e-mail use tricks to disguise the origin of their messages. One of the most common is to relay their messages off the mail server of a third party. This tactic doubles the damages, because now both the receiving system and the innocent relay system are flooded with junk e-mail. For mail that gets through, many times the flood of complaints goes back to the innocent site because that site was made to look like the origin of the spam. Another common trick is to forge the headers of messages, making it appear as though the message originated elsewhere and again providing a convenient target upon which the anger of recipients and the flood of complaints will land.  Theft: The sending of spam results in one party's imposing costs on another, against the party's will and without permission. Some have called unsolicited e-mail a form of postage-due marketing. Others, quite correctly, call it a form of theft. Although some defend unsolicited commercial e-mail as just another form of free speech, those who bear the costs of someone else's speech are left to ask what part is "free."  Harm to the marketplace: When a spammer sends an e-mail message to a million people, it is carried by numerous other systems en route to its destinations, once again shifting cost away from the originator. The carriers in between suddenly are bearing the burden of carrying advertisements for the spammer. The number of unsolicited messages sent out each day is truly remarkable. Numerous court cases are under way between spammers and the innocent victims who have been subjected to such floods. Unfortunately, whereas major corporations can afford to fight these cutting-edge cyber law battles, small mom-and-pop ISPs and their customers are left to suffer the floods. The harm inflicted is in many respects analogous to the effects on society from something like pollution. For example, it would be far cheaper for chemical manufacturers to dump their waste into rivers and lakes. What makes such a situation so dangerous is that when millions of people each suffer only a small amount of damage, it often is more costly for each individual victim to recover the small portion of the harm allocable to them. Thus, the larger population will continue to bear those unnecessary and detrimental costs until their individual damage becomes so great that those costs outweigh the transaction costs of uniting and fighting back. And the spammers are counting on that: they hope that if they steal only a tiny bit from each of millions of people, very few people will bother to fight back.  Consumer perception: E-mail is increasingly becoming a critical business tool. Yet despite the best efforts of service providers, for many people the accessing of e-mail still represents a bit of a struggle. Many of the major online services remain difficult to access at peak traffic times, and network congestion can make it an arduous task to simply download your e-mail. Once you've fought your way online and waited many minutes to retrieve your mail, what do you see' An array of pornographic Web site ads, a few chain letters, and a hot stock tip from a self-styled securities analyst who can't spell. The annoyance and frustration caused by such situations cannot be underestimated. Internet users have deserted many public discussion forums for fear that their e-mail addresses will be harvested and added to junk mail lists. Customers are afraid to give their addresses out in even legitimate commerce for fear of being added to and traded among thousands of mailing lists. Legitimate businesses are afraid to use e-mail to communicate with their existing customers for fear of being branded Net abusers. Such distrust threatens to undermine the acceptance and growth of electronic commerce among the legions of new Internet users taking their first steps online.  Global implications: Electronic mail is a marvelous tool of business and personal communication. It's simple, it's accessible, and it's becoming more and more an indispensable part of our professional lives. But there are even more far-reaching potentials of e-mail that may be lost if the medium's functionality and utility get destroyed by the proliferation of junk e-mail. The Internet is an incredible tool for spreading information critical to the development of freedom and democracy around the world. For instance, e-mail is often cited as a vital tool for communicating with and between Chinese democracy activists, and media stories have even credited e-mail as a critical tool in the overthrow of the Suharto regime in Indonesia. Unless a way is found to protect e-mail from the excesses of unscrupulous marketers, the damage they wreak has profound implications for the growth of free speech and democracy around the world. Protection from SPAM Unsolicited commercial email (spam) is a sad fact of life on today's Internet. While there's no perfect solution that will keep your email mailbox clean, there are many simple steps you can take to alleviate the problem. Protection of Email Address Many spammers operate "bots": autonomous software robots that "crawl" the Web looking for email addresses. If you post your email address publicly anywhere online (on a website, a discussion forum, on USENET, in a guestbook etc.) then sooner or later it will be found by one of these bots and will then get added to a spam mailing list. These harvested email addresses are commonly bundled by the millions onto CDs, which spammers then use to send out their unwanted messages. What can be done'  Don't post your email address in "plain" form anywhere on the Web. Instead, you can disguise your email address by writing it in a convoluted way so that humans can still read it, but bots can't. For example, instead of writing "test1@example.com", use "test AT example DOT com".  Sign up for a new email address to use when you need to supply an email address but don't particularly care about the replies (e.g. when posting on a guestbook)  Keep a "private" email address which you share only with close friends and family. Never use this private email address on any site.  Obfuscate your email address before posting it on your website by using the email address encoding tool.  Use a feedback form on your website instead of providing a contact email address. Choose a Non-Obvious Email Address Some spammers find email addresses by generating likely combinations using automated tools. For example, they may generate a list like aaaaa@hotmail.com, aaaab@hotmail.com, aaaac@hotmail.com and so on. They also make use of word lists and lists of first names and surnames to generate likely email addresses. Of course, most of the email addresses generated automatically using these techniques won't actually exist, but spammers don't care since email is so cheap to send out. ADVICE:  Choose a relatively long email address (8+ characters)  Never sign up for an email address which is the same as your first name or last name (e.g. nathan@hotmail.com). Instead, add your initials and some numbers (e.g. nathan89@hotmail.com) Report SPAM: It's often simpler to just ignore the spam messages and delete them - after all, it takes just a few seconds to read an email, decide it's junk and delete it. But if you want to take things one step further and report it, there are several agencies that keep track of spams and by sending the mail spam information to them, you can report against a spam. Some of these services are Spamcop, Australian Communications and Media Authority, Google has Incident Report form, Whois Guard privacy service. Etc.