Be Safe From Spam!
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited, bulk messages. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, and mobile phone messaging spam.
Why is it neccessary to fight against spam?
Well, SPAM is not only annoying as it sometimes uses unethical words or promotes "viagra" or other medicines but it can be dangeours too as more and more Phishing cases or Vishing cases are coming up. Spam is also one of the major contributors in spreading malwares and thus can be dangeorus for your computer or computer security.
Anyway, know that we know what spam is (hah, as if no one knew about it) we are going to learn about how we can fight against it but hey, in this technical article or a how to guide we are specifically fighting against email spam.
There are various ways of fighting against spam and here they are :
Using WebMail Services : Well, so far I'll say that this will be the best option to fight against the spam. The reason for that is service like Gmail, Yahoo mail or Hotmail (major players) have latest filters to fight against the spam. Also, these filters gets updated as more and more users report spam messages as spam, so a user gets the latest protection against spam. Another use of webmail service is, that all major services provide anti-virus protection for their users and due to which any attachment a user recieves is safe because it is scanned by the latest anti-virus definitions.
In case you are using any Email client : Well, in case of email clients it becomes a bit difficult because major email clients don't have big list of email filters and thus it sometimes can become pain to fight against spam. But, thankfully there are certain programs on the internet which can help you fight against the spam messages. Those spam filtering software integrate with your email client and provide you with some good results. Here's the list of the spam filtering softwares :
SpamHilator : This is a program which filters your spam messages automatically and the good thing about the program is that it also provides filtering rules/plugins (available on the website.) It has a nice support and help file and it works with almost each and every email client because it sits as a wall between your email client and your email server. More information can be found on the software's website.
POPFile : POPFile is another mail classification tool which helps you to be safe from spam. This program can't do anything in starting but once it is trained it can be a very helpful tool to be safe from spam. More information and how to guides of the software is available on the POPFile Website.
K9 : I guess it will be the world's smallest program to fight against spam. It is only of 77KB! Well, it is also a nice program and has good set of features. It works with most of the email clients and the way to teach it and how to use this software is described over here : K9 Homepage.
What else can be done to be safe from spam ?
Well, the best thing is to be safe from spam is by not to distribute your email publicaly. With this I mean, that it is always nice to have 2 or 3 emails for different purposes like 1 email for offical contacts, 1 for friends and 1 for submitting on the internet.
What happens is that when you submit your email on the internet chances are that the website may sell you email information to spammers and thus it can become really bad, but this practise is changing slowly and there are very less sites doing this. Another, possibility is that when you submit your email in forums or a place where your email is visible publically, robots may scan your email and then add it in the spammers database (these robots are made and used by spammers only) and then you start to get spam, so it is always advicable that instead of submitting the email the way it used, submit it the way it can't be recognized as email...for e.g. instead of using your email address as web@reviewsaurus.com submit it as web(at)reviewsaurus.com
I hope that these tips will help you in becoming safe from the email spam.
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