Spam, and we’re not talking canned meat here, is something that many people in the internet community are showing more and more concern for these days. As for the Hormel Food Company, I doubt very much if they appreciate their product being the icon for one of the ugliest aspects of the web today and, to them, I do send my condolences. As for the real spammers, I have no respect for them and will show no pity when the roof finally falls down on them. Here I will try to shed some light on what spam is, how and why it is created and what we can do about it.
     Electronic mail (email) has become an extremely important and popular means of communication these days. Millions, maybe billions, of people on a daily basis rely on it for personal and business purposes. Its low cost, speed and global reach has made it very efficient, easy to use and so convenient for your everyday workload and/or just sharing with friends and family. Now, of course, just like with snail mail, there are those who wish to send you junk mail to sell you their goods or services. Seems to me it’s worse for the environment to send all that paper to billions of homes across the U.S., just to be tossed into the trash, but it still takes ones time and effort to sift through, find, and get rid of that unsolicited email in your inbox everyday. How much spam one receives varies from person to person, but I have heard ranges from two or three a day to two to three hundred a day. A couple in a day is annoying, but hundreds of them can get costly due to time lost and even in mail server storage fees. Many States have enacted legislation intended to regulate the problem, but different states impose different standards and requirements. As a result, they haven’t been all that successful in addressing the problems associated with spam, basically because, since an electronic mail address does not specify a geographic location, it can be extremely difficult for law-abiding businesses to know which of these disparate statutes they are required to comply with. The government is working on it, but in the meantime, it will have to be up to ‘We, the people’.
     Now, we must understand spammers and how they get your email address in the first place. They collect eaddresses in many ways, some legal, most not. New (illegal) ‘robot’ software technologies send webcrawlers, aka, ‘spiders’, to comb the web for websites that contain email links (mailto:) on their pages. These spiders collect and populate their databases with these addresses and sell them for profit. They also gather them up by opt-in methods such as signing up for a web service of some nature where they ask you if you want their sponsors to send you special offers. If you click yes, you are now on several spam databases, then sold over and over again till you’re on hundreds, maybe thousands of these things. There are also the viruses that are sent as spam and if you happen to open it, they are like the spiders, and crawl through your contacts and harvest then to the databases. Then it’s off to the generators, people who design what goes into a spam email. The majority of spam is, in my opinion, generated by idiots hoping to find "customers" with fewer working brain cells than they have so that the “customers” may fall prey to whatever it is they are trying to sell. We can do something about it.
     The “Good Guys” are among us and are highly involved and highly motivated in finding solutions. The ‘anti-spam’ software production is growing both in volume and accuracy. There are too many to list here but they are easily found on the web by going to a search engine and typing in keyword ‘anti spam’. They chiefly use a ‘read’ style software that finds keywords, like “click here” or “to be removed” in the text and the source code that give them away. The email is still delivered to you, but goes into a designated spam folder within your inbox making it easier for you to delete it.
     ISP’s (internet service providers) are waging war against spammers as well, server against server, motivated by the effect their mere volume has on their mail and hosting servers and have some promising solutions They are offering server-side anti-spam protection to their customers and if you do have a spam problem, you should contact your hosting company and ask them about it. Many spammers have found themselves on a list of their own, known as RBL’s, RealTime Black Lists, black lists of the spammers mail servers with which they send these billions of unsolicited emails everyday. When somebody reports a spam complaint to a reporting service, such as spamcop.net, they will notify different RBL’s of the accused spamming servers. SpamCop gathers the suspect emails and do a ‘trace route’ to find and identify the very mail servers that are sending out the spam and put them on the RBL’s. The ISP’s filtration software uses the RBL’s to identify spam before it hits their mail servers, easing their load, and the spam emails will never reach your inbox, easing your load. I would suggest using both as it is working great for me.
     So if you are having a spam problem, fight back, use the tools provided by the good guys and help rid your self of this problem. Then it may be easier for you to have your spam and eggs for breakfast without looking for the delete button.