Email spam ,junk mail, Unsolicited Email is mail you receive that you don't want or didn't ask for and is sent by someone you don't even know. Here we will look at what it is, how it arises and how to control it.

Why do People Spam?

Every week we get a magazine from the local supermarket in our normal mail. This mail I didn't request, but I don't really mind it, and sometimes I even look at what offers they have, and yes sometimes I even buy something because of it.

Now in the world of paper that small magazine costs money to print and money to distribute. In the email world it is essentially free! This means that regardless of the number of people who actually end up buying something based on the contents of the spam email message they can still make a profit, as they have no printing or distribution costs.

How Spammers get your Email Address?

There are many mechanisms by which spammers get the email addresses of their victims. The most popular ones are :

• Harvesting Web Pages
  If you have a website or have written a web page and have included your email address as a contact then there are automatic tools "spiders or bots" (e.g. like email extractor Lite 1.4) that can extract email addresses from web pages..
• Harvesting Newsgroups
  Similar to web page automatic programs.
• Guessing
  As a user there is nothing you can do about this.
• Buying
  If you have subscribed to a newsletter or registered to receive a download or free information then you are on an email mailing list. Some companies sell this mailing list or make it available to other companies for a fee. You should be aware that this is not limited to small unknowns.
• Dictionary Attacks -Automatic software that cycles through email addresses uses a dictionary of names and adds random numbers to the names and then tests to see if they are live. This is very effective with providers like hotmail and Yahoo where you have many uses with addresses like johndoe1@ ,johndoe2@ etc.

How to Control Spam

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.-Benjamin Franklin

Regardless of how careful you may be you will probably eventually appear on a spammers list and because of the nature of how spam works very soon you will appear on other spammers lists.

Therefore you need to look a ways of filtering or blocking the spam before it appears in your inbox. In general there are three filtering mechanisms that can be used. They are:

• Word filtering
• Blacklist filtering
• White list filtering

Word Filters

  This is the most common mechanism used. Most Spam filters use a set of rules or keywords to determine if a message is spam or not. Example: If an email message contains one of the words that your spam filter is looking for, that message is marked as spam.
 
 Other spam filters examine each message looking for "spam-markers" such as common spam subjects, known spammer addresses, known mail forwarding machines, or simply common spam phrases. If any of these conditions are met, the message is classified as spam (junk mail).

White Lists and Black Lists

These are like two sides to a coin "heads or tails". A black list is a list of addresses that you don't want to hear from. Adding an email address to your black list means any messages received from that email address will either be deleted or quarantined depending on the system.

You can create your own black list or subscribe to a free or commercial list. See Spamhaus block list. However see False Positives below

White lists

A white list is a list of addresses that you want to receive email from (your contacts). Adding an email address to your white list means that any messages received from that email address will not be blocked by the Spam filters and will be delivered directly to your inbox!

White lists can be used to stop the Spam filtering of messages only from specific email addresses. Using white lists helps reduce the number of false positives as it takes you most important contacts out of the spam blocking loop.

White lists can however be tedious to maintain as you need to remember to add each new contact to the list.

False Positives-The flip side of fighting Spam

 A False Positive is a legitimate e-mail that is incorrectly blocked by a spam filter because it identifies it as spam. While accidentally deleting email from a friend may be inconvenient, the loss of an email from a customer, client or prospect could be costly.

When setting up and configuring anti spam measures and software be aware of the necessity of not blocking legitimate email. There is no point in choosing an anti spam solution that is 100% effective against spam but also blocks 70% of the legitimate email. In "real world" testing, a false-positive rate of 2% or 3% is usually considered to be exceptionally good.

	Web www.oeupdates.com

Related Articles and Resources:

• phishing spam
• 5 Top Tips to avoid spam
• Outlook Express Spam Control
• Incredimail Spam Control