All about Spam

What is Spam?
Spam is the commonly used term for unsolicited commercial e-mail send in bulk. The most common form of spam is e-mail spam. The main difference between spam and solicited mail, or newsletter, is that you never signed up to receive it anywhere. Other forms of spam are instant messaging (IM) spam, search engine spam, blog spam and mobile phone messaging spam.


What does spam do?
Spam fills your inbox with useless e-mails preventing you from receiving important mails. A large percentage of spam contains ads for pornographic Web sites or other such places that can be unacceptable viewing for many, especially children.
Opening a spam mail could immediately infect your pc with spyware or a worm without your knowledge. Another problem these days are spambots, which are a major producer of e-mail spam. Some spammers create various e-mail viruses that transforms an unprotected PC into a spambot that will inform the spammer of its existence, and the spammer will command it to send a low volume of spam. This allows spammers to send high volumes of spam without being caught by their ISPs or being tracked down by anti-spammers as the low volume makes it hard to detect.

How do spammers obtain my e-mail address?
There are various tools that can be used to harvest e-mail addresses. Some of the common ones are using a spider (bot) to crawl the Web and collect e-mail ids. These Web spiders go around looking for e-mail addresses all over the Web. The most common targets are sites where you give out your email address for purposes of registration, or a Web site where you put up your email id so that members of that site can contact you. Spammers also use techniques such as a dictionary attack, where they guess common names at known domains.


How do I avoid spam?
To stop Web spiders from obtaining your e-mail address, all you have to do is to substitute the ‘@’ symbol with ‘at’ while posting your e-mail address on any site. For example, the e-mail address david@yahoo.com can be posted as david(at)yahoo(dot)com. Just make sure you don’t use the ‘@’ symbol even while posting your e-mail address at forums or guestbooks!
Another great way to get rid of spam is to manually set filters. Most Web-based e-mail services have a button that allows you to categorise all marked mails as spam, so the next time you get spammed from the same source, the mail is automatically redirected to a junk mail folder.
Even e-mail clients have e-mail filters that let you set up some common spam words as a filter to redirect your spam mail to a trash folder.
You can also avoid spam by using a good anti-spam software.