You would have seen an increasing amount of “ junk mail” showing up in your e-mail box. The so called harmless activities of a large number of people are increasingly becoming a serious problem for the Internet.
Spam is the flooding of 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. Spam is basically electronic junk mail or junk newsgroup postings. It is sometimes confused with any unsolicited e-mail. But when an old friend may also find your e-mail address on the net and send you a message, this could hardly be called Spam, even though it is unsolicited.
Real Spam is generally e-mail advertising for some product sent to a mailing list or newsgroup. In addition to wasting people’s time with unwanted e-mail, spam also eats up a lot of network bandwidth. There are many organizations and individuals who have taken it upon themselves to fight spam with a variety of techniques. The problem is that because Internet is public, there is really little that can be done to prevent spam, just as it is impossible to prevent junk mail.
Spamming works on our own greed to receive freebies. You are instructed by a total stranger to forward a message you know nothing about, except for the fact that may be a friend passed it along to you and about 90 of their other very close friends.
Very often the victim can receive so much e-mail (and some times faxes and phone calls in the more malicious cases) that they have to get a new e-mail box or phone number--thereby ruining established personal and professional communication channels, which was the original intent of the sender.
Most spam is commercial advertising, often very dubious products, get-rich-quick schemes or quasi-legal services. It costs the sender very little to send-most of the costs are paid by the recipient or the carriers rather than by the sender.
There is not much really that can be done to protect yourself except that you can ensure your relative safety by creating Internet e-mail accounts like Hotmail and Yahoo which can be easily and frequently changed. Further these accounts also generally offer the option of blocking senders from whom you get spam and you can also opt to block e-mail which has been copied to more than 20 people.
One can also keep oneself informed about spammers through the blacklist of Internet Advertisers, a popular report that describes the offending activities of spammers that routinely distribute large mailings via e-mail or post unwelcome advertising on newsgroups. You can also visit www.spam.abuse.net.
Another organization devoted to countering the destructive effects of spam is MAPS or the Mail Abuse Prevention System. If an offending spammer cannot be shut down, the spammer’s ISP may contact MAPS with the subnet addresses allocated to the spammer. The MAPS website at http://www.mail-abuse.org will yield more useful information on how to counter and control Spam.
Published: February 20, 2008
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