I bet one thing which irritates us all everyday those who use email. No marks for guessing, Yes its four letter word called SPAM or SPAM mails.
Many of my non-technical friends ask me "why these spams get delivered everyday and in such huge numbers, can't it be stopped, so that we get only genuine mails".
spam is usally unwanted, commercial emails sent through email addresses which seem known and subjects of such emails attract the user to have a look at the mail.
I wanted to share some of the interesting facts and figures about spam that I came across. As estimated by MAAWG around 80-85% of mails we receive are "abusive email".
More popular you are, more spam you will receive. According to the Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates receives four million mails per year, most of them being spam, most of these spam mails offer opportunites for debt financing or are about "how to get rich" schemes.
There are many ways of stopping spam, most popular of them is filtering spam emails based on the content. For e.g. emails containing words such as "viagra" gets filtered as spam, but this kind of filtering can create problems when geninue mails get blocked, for e.g. emails containing word "specialist" can get blocked because the word "cialis" is in the blocklist.
spammers have got intelligent and they intentionally misspell a word which is human readable but does not get caught in spam-filter. Spammers write "Viagra" as
"V1agra",
"Via'gra",
"V I A G R A",
"Vaigra" etc.
Using most common variations it is possible to spell "Viagra" in over 1.3 * 1045 ways.
The spamfilter can be trained regularly to understand the changing trend of spam, but it surely creates headaches for email users.
Another way used by spammers for bypassing Spam filters is image spam where the text of the message is stored as a GIF or JPEG image, this way the email gets easily bypassed from the text based spam filters.
As we can see that spam creates lots of nuisance and can easily spread virus causing us more damage.
We can surely take these basic precautions while checking mails:
- DO NOT open mails which you are not expecting and seems to be from unknown person.
- Chain mails ask you to forward them to your friends so that you get luck, DO NOT forward such chain mails.
- Many mails contain subject about making money fast, DO NOT open such mails.
- Keep updating your anti-spam software database.