Spam is the distribution of letters of an advertising nature of a political or commercial nature to those people who did not subscribe to it. Spam refers to emails received on the user's email, phone, social applications such as whats app, skype and many others. Main theme emails can be different: from visiting a resort to offering to earn big money or receive a prize for some action that the user has never done.
The first episode of spam took place in the nineteenth century. In 1864, British politicians received telegrams by telegraph advertising dental services. In the twentieth century, a similar term was used as a trademark of Hormel Foods Corporation. This is was an abbreviation SPAM stands for SPiced hAM, which means "spicy ham" in translation. After the war, advertisements about the remaining unused canned food were broadcast at every step - from the radio, newsstands, on trams and buses. There was a sketch called "SPAM" on a television show in Britain. Hence the modern name.
Sometimes spam from harmless letters turns into a real black PR. For example, with its help, one company can denigrate another by sending Internet and phone users some messages that discredit the reputation of the latter. With the help of such mailings, pornography, drugs and much more is advertised, which is prohibited by law.
Disguised as spam extortion of money. For example, a woman receives a message in the mail that her son had an accident and asks to send money for a complex operation and a number where savings should be sent. Those women who have never experienced such actions believe and send money. And then it turns out that the son is healthy and nothing happened to him. More details about the types will be discussed below.
Types of spam
The most common type is advertising. With the help of advertising, companies sell services, offer goods. Such advertising is permitted at the legislative level. But many recipients are still wary.
Another type are Nigerian letters". The name was formed due to the fact that a large number of such messages were received in Nigeria. The recipient of such a letter is promised a large amount of money, but it is necessary to arrange the opening of an account, shipping costs, which the fraudster will allegedly pay only when the recipient sends the money to him.
Almost the same in appearance is phishing". Allegedly, the bank administration will block the recipient's account if he does not send his details and confirm the data on the site, under which the link of the spammer site is hidden. Thus, the scammers will receive all the necessary data in order to transfer the money in the recipient's account to themselves.
happiness letters, common among schoolchildren and the adult population, in our country are also one of the varieties. They are based on the requirement to send a message to as many friends as possible. And in return, a miracle will happen in the life of the recipient in a few days. Sometimes such messages may contain a negative character. For example, to threaten punishment from heaven if a person does not forward a certain number of letters to friends.
All these legal and illegal actions are committed by people who are called spammers. They can be mailers, database collectors, software vendors, and even the average user. If a person wants to report something to many people without their request or consent, he automatically becomes a spammer.
This type of mailing brings benefits to customers of letters. Fighting this species is difficult, but possible.
How to deal with spam
You can deal with mailings yourself. If you often receive messages from a particular group or user, you can always add a person to black list and make sure that messages get into a specially designated block. On the site mail.ru, or Yandex.Mail, it is called "Spam".
For a user who wants to protect himself from spammers, Not recommended publish your mailing address on public websites. Or create a special box if you have to register in unreliable groups and communities. Not recommended reply to messages like this or follow the links in them. Perhaps a script is already hidden in the link that will block your computer or phone at best. At worst, it will get access to your cards and bank accounts.
There are special software that protects against annoying mailings. Typically, such anti-spam modules are built into the anti-virus or installed separately. Kaspersky Lab, Antispamus, Counterspam are the best of these programs.
In phones, it is recommended to blacklist such senders. Letters will be coming in separate block under the name "Antispam" in the phone. And the recipient, if he wants, can look, if not, he can put it on automatic deletion after a certain number of days.
You can find examples below in the pictures. Such are harmless mailings are also called spam on the Internet.
These are examples of mailings from ordinary users. There are entire companies, for example, computer repair, window installers, that do this kind of mailing, inserting links to their pages in usernames or in words. Below is an example:
What to do with spam emails
Why spam is dangerous
First of all, it is dangerous because in a pile of various mailing lists you will have to look for a really useful letter from a friend or worker for a long time. By opening a spam email and clicking on a link, you expose yourself and your corporate network to various viruses. Thirdly, the additional load on the network.
Have you received emails with promotional content? Yes? Then you know what spam is. Almost all of those in the world today allocate a huge amount of funds to combat spam. Developers create a variety of programs and scripts that allow you to detect advertising messages and block them, as well as their senders.
Despite this, such letters continue to come. Some of them are indeed detected and automatically transferred to the Spam folder (every mail provider already has it now); the rest can really come to the Inbox section.
We will tell you more about what is in e-mail, why it is sent and how to deal with it, in this article.
What is spam?
In general, the word "spam" comes from the name of spicy minced meat (from pork and beef), the name of which was used in a comedy series in 1971. As planned by the scriptwriter, in one cafe, visitors were so aggressively advertised this product that they literally did not stop using the word "SPAM". The meaning was precisely in the constant, excessive and at the same time aggressive repetition of the specified word.
Today, "spam" refers to automated mass mailing of advertising correspondence. Unlike simple advertising, such a mailing does not have - it is sent to a huge number of people without a specific purpose: simply hoping that some small part of the addressees will be interested in the offer.
In the era of electronic technology, we all know what spam is. In email, SMS, social networks and even in regular mailboxes, we can find a lot of messages that are sent on behalf of certain companies offering their services.
Spam can be very intrusive, and sometimes even dangerous for the recipient. We will talk about this in more detail below. In the meantime, more specifically about those who benefit from such mailings.
Who sends spam?
As already noted, we receive a lot of inappropriate advertising offers. All these letters (spam) act most often in the interests of the companies with which they are advertised (suppliers that are described in the offer). In some cases, spam mailings can be carried out in order to achieve the opposite effect - to scare away the consumer in order to annoy the competitor.
Of course, if you find a letter with an advertisement for a shoe store in your mailbox, this does not mean that the store itself makes such a mailing. Most likely, the messages were sent from a special server designed for such purposes. And the owner of the store could simply order a similar mailing list.
Another situation is when they try to send you spam with a request or an offer containing some obviously fraudulent nature. For example, these are the well-known "letters of happiness" that your distant rich relative left millions of dollars as an inheritance, and you are required to pay commissions in the amount of $ 200-300. This type of letter is most likely sent by just a group of people who have access to the necessary tools (for example, it can be a spam program, a server and a mailing list).
What are they advertising?
If we talk about what is advertised in spam emails, then this is a huge number of options. The newsletter can promote a particular company, product or service, online store or service. In such a case, of course, the spammers are trying to be covert so as not to harm the service provider. For example, official companies will not spam as it is illegal. For that, they can use a shim site or a front store.
In other cases, spam may contain links to various sites containing viruses; programs that can harm your computer, pornographic materials, various requests from fake people. Such mailings are carried out just by groups of people who simply earn money in illegal ways. It can even be hackers - specialists with special knowledge in this area.
Is it profitable?
According to unofficial studies, spammers earn millions of dollars every year from their activities. They advertise adult websites, drug stores, and send viruses and scam messages to millions of people. Imagine that, despite the fact that many are aware of what email spam is and how harmful it can be to the recipient, people continue to believe what is written and send money, buy access to websites, tablets, and even install programs.
If you give a specific answer, then yes - spam is very beneficial. Otherwise, they wouldn't be doing it. It's just that the other side of the coin is the question of how difficult it is to send mailings in terms of monetary costs. After all, even a non-professional understands that the spam program (or some special script) and the server from which the mailing will be carried out, as well as a host of other technical nuances, are additional costs that need to be recouped from the profit from the messages sent. Therefore, it is impossible to say that spam is a simple activity. A lot of people do this, but only a small part manage to earn really big money here.
Spam in email
Spam appeared in e-mail, probably, first of all. Of course, it was a particularly effective tool at the very beginning of the development of Internet technologies. At that time, people still did not know what spam was, what to do with incoming letters, that there really was no inheritance, and you could forget about the money sent to the specified details.
Later, of course, mail services took care of the problem of spam. They were forced to introduce the first mechanisms for blocking spammers, which were later successfully solved. This is how the anti-spam industry has been working for the last few years: those who send out emails come up with something new; and the task of mail services is to create a filter that will prevent letters from reaching users.
All modern Internet companies, including Yandex, are struggling with the phenomenon referred to in this article. Spam has become their main enemy, so the search engine development team has been constantly improving methods for selecting advertising letters for several years now. Their success so far has been mixed as unwanted mail keeps coming in.
Spam in other services and services
In addition to mail, there are many other services used by spammers. In fact, these are various forums, blogs, regular sites, message boards, social networks, abandoned resources that are no longer being worked on. This indicates that, despite the fight against such a phenomenon, no one knows how to remove spam.
Unless you can learn from the experience of the most technologically advanced players in the IT market - the largest social networks (Facebook, Twitter), where spam is constantly detected and deleted. And then - even there you can find a huge amount of hidden (and not so much) spam.
How to fight?
Just the question arises: how to deal with such a negative phenomenon? Is it possible to make browser spam stop annoying ordinary users, who, for the most part, are not interested in the products offered?
It is necessary to fight intrusive messages, but it is still impossible to eradicate such a thing as spam. The most effective tools are simply automatic and manual control of what users send to each other, as well as some kind of restrictions that can be used to reduce the growth in the number of spam messages.
For example, in the same Gmail there are filters that reject messages containing links that are sent in large volumes to different people. Such accounts will be blocked very quickly, and spam emails will not reach the recipients.
The problem with this technique is the many variations of forms of spam. Roughly speaking, it can be sent not only in the form of links and not from one account. In fact, attackers can create many accounts on different IP addresses in such a way as to hide their real intentions. It will be more difficult for the postal service to detect such activity.
What measures are being taken?
In addition to the simple compilation of filters, mail services are conducting many innovative developments that allow spam to be recognized in one form or another. With their help, users will not think about how to remove spam, and this will make working with mail much more convenient.
However, no one knows how such solutions work, why they still miss intrusive advertising messages. It's just that in the technology news section, major mail providers sometimes publish information about the test of new protection mechanisms; and over time, you can see how the number of spam messages really decreases. How these mechanisms work remains a secret.
You have received spam. What to do?
If you see an unsolicited email in your mailbox that is clearly advertising (or fraudulent) in nature, do not panic. All you need to do is to click the "Mark as spam" button (if your mail provider has one) in order to inform the service about the promotional nature of the message. If you don't have a "This is spam" button, just delete the email.
In no case do not follow the links indicated there and do not download the attached files! Don't forget what email spam is! It could be a program that can steal your data or infect your computer.
Newsletter Responsibility
If suddenly you would like to try to deal with spamming on your own, we hasten to warn you that this is a criminally punishable activity, including in our country. Therefore, we do not recommend trying.
The modern look of the bank
The word "SPAM" originally appeared in the city. It stood for SPiced hAM (spicy ham) and was a trademark for Hormel Foods canned meat - spicy minced pork sausage. The term SPAM gained worldwide fame as applied to annoying advertising thanks to the famous sketch of the same name from the famous show Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969) by the comedian group Monty Python. The point of the sketch is that in one cafe, all dishes on the menu contain "SPAM", some even several times. When the main character of the sketch, who came to this cafe with his wife, asks to bring him a dish without "SPAM", the waitress offers him a dish with "a little SPAM". The visitor is indignant, and the Viking choir, sitting at neighboring tables, begins to sing the song of praise to "SPAM", after which the sketch plunges into chaos. At the end of the sketch, the hero's wife exclaims: I don't like SPAM! (English) "I don't like spam!"). In the credits, the word "SPAM" was also added to the names of the actors. In total, this word is mentioned in the sketch more than a hundred times.
The most common types of spam
Advertising
Some legitimate businesses advertise their products or services through spam. They can carry out its distribution on their own, but more often they order it from those companies (or individuals) that specialize in this. The attractiveness of such advertising lies in its relatively low cost and (presumably) large reach of potential customers. Such unsolicited advertising can backfire, causing rejection in recipients, and can even become synonymous with intrusive advertising, as happened with ham, they can actually increase sales without giving recipients much trouble. The main terms of mutual benefit for the recipient and the organizer of the mailing list are:
- combining the roles of the mailing list organizer and the provider of e-mail services;
- improving the quality of the target audience of each specific promotional mailing;
- warning customers by the provider that he will send promotional emails;
- providing convenient means to block unwanted emails.
Advertising of illegal products
Spam often advertises products that cannot be reported in other ways - for example, pornography, counterfeit (fake) goods, drugs with circulation restrictions, illegally obtained classified information (databases), counterfeit software.
Anti-advertising
"Nigerian Letters"
Sometimes spam is used to extort money from the recipient of the email. The most common method was called "Nigerian letters" because a large number of such letters came from Nigeria. Such a letter contains a message that the recipient of the letter can somehow receive a large amount of money, and the sender can help him with this. Then the sender of the letter asks to transfer some money to him under the pretext of, for example, paperwork or opening an account. Defrauding this amount is the goal of scammers.
A narrower name for this type of fraud is scam or scam 419(according to the article number in the Criminal Code of Nigeria).
Phishing
Distribution methods
Spam folder in the mail client window
The largest flow of spam is distributed via e-mail (e-mail). Currently, the share of viruses and spam in the total e-mail traffic is, according to various estimates, from 70 to 95 percent. In spam, advertising of unpopular goods is most common: viagra, etc. .
Fight against spam
Ideology
Obviously, spam brings economic benefits to its customers. This means that users, despite their dislike of spam, still use the services advertised through spam. As long as the return on spam outweighs the cost of overcoming protection, spam will not disappear. Thus, the most reliable way to fight is to refuse services advertised through spam. There are proposals to use social stigma, up to and including termination of communication, against individuals who buy spam-advertised goods and services.
Other methods are aimed at making it difficult for spammers to access users.
Preventive protection measures
The most reliable way to fight spam is to prevent spammers from knowing your email address. This is a difficult task, but some precautions can be taken.
All methods of hiding an address have a fundamental drawback: they create inconvenience not only for alleged spammers, but also for real recipients. In addition, it is often necessary to publish the address - for example, if it is the contact address of the company.
Filtration
Because promotional emails tend to be very different from regular mail, a common method of dealing with them has become to weed them out of the incoming mail stream. At present, this method is the main and most widely used.
Automatic filtering
There is software (software) for automatic detection of spam (so-called spam filters). It may be intended for end users or for use on servers. This software uses two main approaches.
The first is that the content of the letter is analyzed and a conclusion is made whether it is spam or not. A letter classified as spam is separated from other correspondence: it can be marked, moved to another folder, deleted. Such software can run both on the server and on the client's computer. In the latter case, the user does not see the filtered spam, but continues to incur the costs associated with receiving it, since the filtering software receives each letter and only then decides whether to show it or not. On the other hand, if the software is running on a server, the user does not bear the cost of transferring it to his computer.
The second approach is to use various methods to identify the sender as a spammer without looking at the text of the letter. This software can only work on a server that directly receives emails. With this approach, additional traffic is spent only by the server for communicating with spammer mail programs (that is, for refusing to accept letters) and accessing other servers (if any) during the check.
There are also specialized online services, for example, Kaspersky Lab (Kaspersky Hosted Security service), Outcom (SPAMOREZ), INKAP (Antispam-Post), which provide paid spam protection. Changing the MX record in the company's domain name (see
Another problem with automatic filtering is that it can mistakenly mark useful messages as spam. Therefore, many mail services and programs, at the request of the user, may not delete those messages that the filter considers spam, but place them in a separate folder.
Automatic filtering methods
Automatic filtering programs use a statistical analysis of the content of an email to decide if it is spam. The greatest success has been achieved with algorithms based on Bayes' theorem. For these methods to work, preliminary "training" of filters is required by passing manually sorted letters to it in order to identify statistical features of normal letters and spam.
The method works very well when sorting text messages (including the selection can cut off up to 95-97% of spam. To bypass such filters, spammers sometimes put the content in the picture attached to the letter, while the text is either missing or random, which is not allows the filter to compile statistics for recognizing such messages.In this case, you must use text recognition programs (most modern email programs do not support this), or use other methods.
The key to the reliable operation of the Bayesian method is the constant additional training of the filter and an indication to it of the mistakes it makes. In mail programs, for this, the possibility of manually marking a message as “spam / non-spam” is introduced, and in mail services on the Internet, a “report spam” button is introduced.
Optional filtering
Many programs and mail services on the Internet allow the user to set their own filters. Such filters may consist of words or, more rarely, regular expressions, depending on the presence or absence of which the message goes or does not go to the dustbin. However, such filtering is time consuming and inflexible, and it also requires the user to have a certain degree of familiarity with computers. On the other hand, it allows you to effectively filter out some of the spam, and the user knows exactly which messages will be filtered out and why.
Blacklists
Ownership, use, effectiveness
These include:
- lists of IP addresses of computers known to send spam.
- (widely used) lists of computers that can be used for mailing - "open relays" and "open proxies", as well as - lists of "dialups" - client addresses that cannot have mail servers
- (possible use) a local list, or a list maintained by someone else.
- (widespread due to ease of implementation) blacklists that are queried through the DNSBL service ( DNS B lack L ist). Currently, this method is not very efficient. Spammers find new computers for their purposes faster than they can be blacklisted. In addition, multiple computers sending spam can compromise an entire mail domain or subnet, and thousands of legitimate users will be unable to send mail to servers using such a blacklist indefinitely.
- (there are) lists of those who preach rather radical theories (for example, equating viral messages with malicious spam, etc.).
Misuse
Often irresponsible and incorrect use of blacklists by resource administrators, leading to the blocking of a large number of innocent users.
Example: use of lists without exact representations of what addresses are included in it and how, use of mail blacklists for web resources, etc.
Irresponsible use
Example: failure to provide the user (or administrator) of a blocked address with information about the list (since there are a great many of them) or to guide their actions by the principle of the presumption of guilt.
Racketeering by blacklist administrators
Recently, there have been more and more complaints on the net about blacklist administrators who blackmail ISPs and hosting providers by refusing to remove IP addresses from which spam was once possibly sent (addresses are blacklisted by anonymous complaints, which are often impossible to verify) . In addition, many require "donations" from the owners of IP addresses for the removal of entries from the black lists.
Mail server authorization
Various methods have been proposed to confirm that the computer sending the letter is indeed eligible (Sender ID , SPF , Caller ID , Yahoo DomainKeys, MessageLevel ), but they have not yet become widespread. In addition, these technologies limit some common types of mail server functionality: it becomes impossible to automatically forward correspondence from one mail server to another (
A common policy among ISPs is that clients are only allowed to establish SMTP connections with the ISP's servers. In this case, it becomes impossible to use some of the authorization mechanisms.
Greylistings
There are quite a few methods of attracting a person's attention, but spam has become widespread these days. What is spam and what does it represent?
Regular Internet users, who have been such for a long time, most likely already know what spam is, by the way they have encountered it more than once in their daily activities. But if most people are aware of the existence of spam, then their knowledge is usually limited, but spam requires more attention.
Without a doubt, spam is one of the cheapest ways to get people's attention. And many advertisers use spam without remorse. But it is difficult to get customers for illegal products or materials that even adults do not need to familiarize themselves with in a pious way, for which spam is almost ideal, and sometimes even the only distribution option.
What is spam and how to understand it
In everyday understanding, spam can be considered absolutely all unwanted information that sometimes comes in an incomprehensible way to e-mail, this is certainly correct, but modern spam is no longer limited to e-mail. Now spam is distributed not only through the Internet, it is part of the Internet. Spam can be considered an excessive presence of any information that a person has to meet or even interact with without his consent, thereby not only interfering and slowing down his activity, but provoking the emergence of a danger both to the confidentiality of personal data and other unfavorable phenomena.
Based on the same e-mail, then some messages may not be spam, but let's say it will be unwanted information. In fact, it will be correct if everyone singles out for themselves what is junk mail and what is spam.
Spam- this is a mass mailing of unwanted information to users, the overwhelming majority of which is automatic, in turn, which initially do not need it. This is a slightly outdated definition, although it can be associated not only with mail, but also with other types of messages.
Samo spam concept, is a kind of disease of the Internet, it applies not only to junk mailing lists, but also to instant messaging services, social networks and even websites, search results, etc. For a spammer, spam in some cases is a way to attract attention, advertising and anti-advertising, and sometimes it is a way to enrich the ignorance of the final recipient of information.
Why are mass mailings and mass publications used? Everything is simpler than it might seem, because with a large list of both mailing lists and recipients of information found in other ways, if it is advertising, you can almost easily find more potential customers or attract visitors to the site. Also, the possibility is not ruled out, and usually it is pursued, this is the search for potential victims of fraud.
The emergence of spam, how it all began
The term Spam itself comes from the overabundance of advertisements for canned meats left unused by US soldiers after the end of World War II. They were called spicy or peppered ham from the English. SPicedhAM. People for a long time remembered the SPAM they encountered, and subsequently one of the unintentional mass mailings of e-mail messages was now associated with this parietal in 1993. This was caused by a program written with an error, with the help of which 200 exactly identical e-mails were sent. But that spam was just a mistake, which is not true of many of today's mailing lists.
Types of spam and where you can usually find it
As mentioned earlier, such junk mailings cost practically nothing to a spammer, but the recipient, for the wrong actions, can pay quite seriously. In addition, each Internet provider has its own tariffs and rates, and searching among unwanted mail and web spam for the necessary information due to traffic overruns can cost more.
In addition to various ways to independently collect email addresses, including automated ones, entire organizations are engaged in this not the most noble way, and mailing lists can also be purchased. Mailing can also be carried out using any poorly protected computer, which is possible after activating specialized software on it.
Spam email
The existence of the possibility of receiving a potential threat is no longer a rarity, which in the end can force or convince to transfer any amount of money to an unknown account. This is nothing more than extortion of money, and for an attacker, the dissemination of such information is a simple and sure way. The spammer hopes that due to the large number of recipients of spam, whoever responds to it and falls into a trap.
In order not to fall for a scam, you need to understand the meaning of Phishing, this method of mailing fraud is used to lure out confidential information. Such information can actually be information about a bank account, the attacker's goal may be the ability to obtain his login and password. Such mailings are disguised as closely as possible as official organizations with their own clones of official websites, on behalf of which the message was allegedly received. As you know, serious organizations do not ask you to provide them with personal information by e-mail.
Very often, mailing lists may contain attachments, sometimes even from the first time and do not understand that the content is a computer virus or a mail worm, which, for example, independently distributes itself, they can collect all possible necessary information and send it all to correct address.
Comments on websites: blogs, forums and bulletin boards
At the moment, there are quite a lot of spammers, especially among webmasters, who want to leave a link in the comments of a blog or forum, which, with the right approach, can be a plus for his site, and for a site with too many outgoing links, this can be a verdict, because such the Internet resource for the search engine will be spammed. Owners of such sites should not forget about the need to moderate posts and comments.
As for bulletin boards, texts very similar to real ads can be published, with a large number of outgoing links, and if an inattentive moderator missed this type of spam, this will affect not only the fact that the search engine considers the board, the site spam, but users will react with a warning to such Internet resources, strange ads will arouse suspicion.
Increasingly, you can stumble upon the supposedly blog of a taxi driver Roman, who earns millions, weight loss methods and other sites that are actually useless for a person. Separate sites are created to praise their site, which, apparently, due to its low information content and usefulness, cannot achieve the desired traffic. What can we say about filling such sites with machine text. An overabundance of advertising, including pop-up windows that interfere with viewing the necessary information, which is not always possible to close without difficulty, is the lot of dishonest site owners.
Search engine spam is a type of clogging search results with sites that do not carry anything useful, except for the needs for which they were created by the owner. These sites very often appear in the first places in the search results, but thanks to the constantly improving search algorithms, they also quickly fall under the filter, still be vigilant.
Spam on social networks
What is spam is most likely already clear from some of the material read, but social spam is a slightly different method of attracting attention.
For spam on social networks, hacked accounts of the most ordinary users are very often used, as well as accounts can be created on purpose, false groups are created. You and your friends can also get into such trouble, and the strange message that has arrived can only testify to his not quite human activity. Just as with receiving suspicious mail and spending time on the site, you should beware of fraud.
Often, people using social networks are invited to groups they don’t need, they are invited to be friends, since this can be a mass invitation, this method is rightfully considered spam. Many social media pages networks to which attraction is carried out can have, like sites, not reliable information, offer low-quality goods, although this is not a regularity, but the administration is constantly fighting this type of fraud.
SMS messages can also be spam
SMS messages with advertising or spam are no longer a rarity for a mobile phone, and here, just like everywhere else, you need to distinguish truth from lies. Otherwise, it is possible to subscribe to paid SMS news channels, the availability of which will be known only over time. Spam for smartphones is not much different, in such messages it very often sends links to malicious programs, under the pretext of, for example, viewing a photo or updating a browser.
A few years ago, the request of a parent to replenish the account for any amount was especially popular, in connection with a problem with a child, but there were those who fell into such a trap.
How to protect yourself from spam and its consequences
No matter how much you would like to have a short and beautiful mailbox name - this will not be a good option to protect yourself from spam, because such addresses most often end up in the mailing list.
If possible, you should refrain from publicly publishing your email address in places accessible to everyone. In addition to manual addition, such addresses can be added completely automatically using specialized software to the spam database. Even if the need for such publication is still required, you need to do this with minor changes, for example, change the @ symbol to the word of the same name or separate some characters with a space.
This method will help, albeit a little, but protect against automated matching of your email address to a spam database. Actually, approximately this method can be used for ICQ and other network identifiers.
To register on sites, it would not be bad to have an additional mailbox, thereby securing your main one. On GSM devices, you just need to ignore the incoming message, and also not respond to it, the principles of the attackers' work remain practically unchanged.
If the message - spam nevertheless reached you, then you should not follow the links in it and test the security of your computer by opening unknown attachments, and the response to such a message will only confirm that the mail is being used, and the spam has reached the addressee.
Modern email clients provide one of the best ways to fight spam - it's filtering incoming messages. Although there are a lot of automatic filtering methods, all of them are not ideal, so the most ordinary message can be blocked, so many services create a separate folder for such messages, the contents of which the user can familiarize themselves with.
Also, to combat spam, you can set up rules that automatically transfer messages from permanent spam addresses to a specific folder, this is possible with most email clients. As for the fight against spam on sites, a lot depends on their owners, and avoiding such web resources is perhaps the best option to secure your computer.
Spam has become so integrated into our lives that many people don't even notice it. What can we say about the Internet? When asking what spam is, you need to look around, on the poles, in your mailbox you can sometimes notice a lot of excessive advertising, which can also be called spam, albeit household.
Every Internet user at least once received an email from an unknown addressee.
Political advertising, a call to visit a site, or an offer for a promotional product repeatedly littered the mailbox, preventing access to important messages. This phenomenon is called unsolicited distribution of information or in other words - spam.
Interesting! The word "spam" appeared at the beginning of the twentieth century. Then the so-called expired canned food that consumers did not buy. One day, the manufacturer sent a batch of such canned food to the American Navy, emphasizing the need and benefits of these goods. Then spam began to be associated with unsolicited mailings that did not bring any benefit.
Today, the definition is most often used in the Internet environment, denoting with this word all types of advertising sent to users without their consent or request.
What is email spam
It's hard to imagine, but 80% of all email content is spam. Offers of joint cooperation, congratulations on a non-existent win, and even threats come to the mail. There are also quite funny messages from foreign spammers who use Google Translate to compose the text.
In general, three main groups of such messages can be distinguished:
- Legitimate advertising (used by small companies that want to attract potential customers. Most often, such correspondence does not pose a threat to the operation of the device, and sometimes it provides the recipient with interesting information: sales announcements, information about the opening of a new department, etc.).
- Illegal advertising (promotion of prohibited goods or illegal services).
- Game advertising (enticing messages with offers to take part in various games: letters of happiness, flash mobs).
- a catchy headline (“Win a million dollars!”, “Receive an inheritance from a deceased relative”, “Participate in the prize draw”, “URGENT! Invest money at a favorable interest rate” and the like);
- unknown addressee (often foreigners act as the sender);
- lack of useful information or links to dubious sites.
Why email is attractive to spam
This question is of interest to many who have encountered such a mailing list. Indeed, sometimes the meaning of the message is so veiled that users do not understand why spammers spend their time on such operations. There are still reasons:
- Cheap advertising (70% of all unsolicited messages on the RuNet are custom-made, which indicates a high concentration of advertising messages. Small shops, illegal institutions and any other enterprises that want to save on advertising use the mailing list as a method of promoting their goods and services).
- Theft (links to malware that "infest" received messages are aimed at infecting the operating system, which, as a rule, is accompanied by the theft of personal information, including information about bank accounts and deposits).
How to get rid of spam mail
Of course, everyone who has encountered "garbage" in their box tries to get rid of annoying letters and restore the correct operation of the device. But this process is not always achieved by pressing one key, sometimes you need to try very hard to protect yourself from "malicious" mail.
No matter how obvious it may sound, but the simplest and most reliable mail protection against spam is the security measures that every Internet user must take. What not to do while working on the Web:
- Leave your email address on publicly accessible sites. Forums, comments and announcements are the main sources from which spammers draw new "victims".
- Use one box for all occasions. It is best to have several email addresses, for example: for work, personal correspondence and entertainment. Then you can use one mail for business correspondence, another for communicating with friends, and a third for registering on various resources.
- Do not read the license agreement. When registering on online platforms, it is necessary to study the information in full. More and more stores and blogs offer to subscribe to the newsletter, automatically checking the box indicating the user's consent. Having studied in detail all the nuances of registration, you can unsubscribe.
- Conduct correspondence with the addressee. Some recipients of unsolicited emails try to remove themselves from the mailing list by writing about it in a return email. This is a huge mistake, giving the "green light" to the addressee. A response to a malicious message informs the spammer that the mail is "live", there is a real person there, which means that there is an audience for advertising.
We have reviewed methods that warn users against malicious mailings, but what about those who made a mistake and disclosed data about themselves to third parties?
So, a lot of spam comes in the mail. What to do?
Unsubscribing
In some messages there is a special button that allows you to opt out of unsolicited mailings. But even here you have to be very careful. The fact is that many scammers use this button to signal that the mail is active, and vice versa, add the address to the priority list for mailing. That is why it is recommended to use this option only when letters come from a known address (for example, from a popular store or company).
Spam filters for mail servers
The most common and reliable mail protection against spam. Filtering occurs automatically and allows you to filter out unnecessary messages from really important messages. There are two ways in which mail spam filters work:
- The first option involves a comprehensive assessment of the address from which the letter was sent. So, messages coming from a server with a low rating are automatically marked as spam and are not opened. In this case, the filter must be installed on the mail server;
- The second option involves evaluating the message itself according to the special criteria discussed above, highlighting "virtual garbage" among ordinary letters. If the system determines the malicious nature of the message, the mail falls into spam. The filter in this case can be installed both on the server and on the user's personal computer.
Blocking spam using mail settings
Each mail service has a system for filtering unwanted messages. We will show the process based on one of the most popular resources. So, how to block spam in Mail?
The first step is to accurately determine the nature of the message, since this method is only suitable for those letters that are undoubtedly spam.
Then you need to follow a few simple steps:
Important! The procedure should be repeated several times. This is necessary so that the mail service remembers the addressee and automatically highlights such messages as spam. Mail spam protection in this case automatically transfers messages to the junk mail folder.
Am I a spammer?
And what if messages do not come to the user, but vice versa - they are sent from his mail. This situation is becoming more and more common in recent years. Trying to protect themselves, scammers break into mailboxes and send messages from someone else's name.
So, spam is sent from my mail. What to do?
change Password
The most reliable way to protect your mailbox is to change your password. You can use the prompts of the mail service or use complex, combined alphanumeric passwords for your account.
Attention! It is unacceptable to use data available to attackers as a password: first name, last name and date of birth. And also banal passwords are easy to crack:
11111, 12345 or qwerty1234.
Checking mail for spam list
An important step that is necessary for the correct operation of your email. There are many programs on the Web (for example, https://whoer.net/ru) that allow you to quickly check for the presence of IP in the black list.
Why is it important? It's simple: if the account is marked as malicious, the sent mail will not reach the recipient.
The presented methods of email protection are simple and accessible to every user. Remember that spam elimination begins with the implementation of security measures and the non-disclosure of personal data in open sources.
