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| News > SPAM News | ||
| Issued - 9/7/2004 | ||
| SPAM - the more common interpretation is no longer a luncheon meat combining the words SPICE and HAM, rather it’s the barrage of junk e-mail we are experiencing on a daily basis. We receive several questions weekly about the topic. While junk e-mails may be classified in much the same way as junk postal mail, or telemarketing, the single most significant difference in spam is the lack of cost to the spammer. While junk postal mail largely subsidizes postal costs and telemarketing adds substantial revenues to utility companies keeping residential phone costs down, junk e-mail actually costs the recipient. The recipient does not necessarily see these costs, but they are passed on in higher connection fees from your ISP. While I won’t get into any detail, suffice it to say there are significant costs to the ISP in the bandwidth and CPU usage and administrative costs associated with the handling of junk mail. The most frequently asked question, but hardest to answer, has to be, "Why do people spam?" If we could answer this, along with, "Why do people create computer viruses and try to hack into systems?" we’d probably have to be in that same criminal or borderline criminal element as they. The "If it’s too good to be true" rule is absolutely relevant to all spam. Are you unintentionally assisting spammers? If you forward e-mails with large recipient lists, probably. These are skimmed off the Internet by spammers. Do you have an HTML site with a “mailto:” FORM? Bots (computer programs derived from the word Robots) continually scan sites, reading source code and acquiring e-mail addresses. Note, for web site e-mail addresses, AFFCOM writes program code that cannot be read in HTML source code. Have you submitted a 'REMOVE' as a result of junk mail, assuming that you would no longer get that spam. This actually made your address much more valuable since the spammers now know that the e-mail address is legitimate and is being read by a human. Lately, spam mail is being sent to organizations showing the sender as an employee or associate of that organization. In computers, this is an easy imitation. If you check the E-mail Header (see: http://www.internetprivacyfordummies.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=10&page=1&POSTNUKESID=0ba38cf30fe941deb0fb9c3478b78bfe), you’ll learn that in fact the employee had nothing to do with the spam and that the e-mail was generated in some far off place, likely outside of the United States. Most spam comes from spam friendly ISP’s or from systems owned directly by spam marketers. AFFCOM/UniPro hosting is totally void of all spam. If, at times, you discover legitimate e-mails that are not reaching your assigned destination, it could be that your ISP is allowing spam and has been subsequently blacklisted by other ISP’s. In this matter you, may wish to look at alternative ISP services. You have several options for controlling junk or spam mail. If you use Outlook or Outlook Express, click on the Organize button and it will give you several features for filtering, deleting or pointing junk mail to other folders. In Nestcape click on Edit menu and select Mail Filters. As well, most AFFCOM/UniPro hosting has Spam mail filtering at the server level. If you are using AFFCOM/Unipro hosting, documentation on this can be provided to you. If you have specific questions on spam or if we can be of assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us. |
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