A Free Educational Resource Created by Carnegie Mellon University to Empower You to Secure Your Part of Cyberspace

Spam

Unwanted email used mainly for advertising

Spam is the term used for unsolicited, impersonal bulk electronic messages. Although email spam is the most common form of spamming, others exist, like mobile phone messaging spam and instant messaging spam.

Spam involves sending nearly identical messages to thousands (or millions) of recipients. Spammers use software robots, called spambots (also Web crawlers or Web spiders) in order to get valid email addresses from company Web sites, blogs and newsgroups. Common subjects of spam messages are pornographic or other sexually related Web sites, various financial services or get-rich-quick schemes and health products.

Spam messages normally have a fake origin address, which is randomly generated, in order to keep the author of the message from being easily discovered.

Protective Measures

Practices

  • Avoid publishing your email addresses on a Web page. If you want to display it, you can make it unreadable by a computer, but recognizable to a human being. One way to do this is to replace the “@” symbol with either text that suggests this symbol (e.g., joe.smith[at]hotmail.com instead of joe.smith@hotmail.com) or with a graphics file (e.g., a .gif file) that represents that symbol. You can also display your entire email address using a graphics file. Of course, none of these tricks will stop a human being from getting your email address.

Settings

  • Use a spam filter on your computer. Activate spam detection and removal, if you have email provided by a free webmail service (like Yahoo! or Gmail). Or, ask your system administrator about a spam detector for your company.

Tools

Anti-spam appliances: This refers to a piece of hardware specifically designed to prevent spam. They have proven to be easier to install and maintain than anti-spam software. The anti-spam appliances work mainly as a firewall against messages. Such devices examine every arriving message for some keyword or signature that identifies the message as spam. Depending on how it is configured, the device can perform several actions, such as to add the string “[spam]” to the subject line, automatically dismiss the message, or quarantine the message and erase it after a period of time. The Web site Spam Help  shows a list of several anti-spam appliances.

Legal Issues

Ethical

The intentional distribution of spam is clearly unethical, since it disrupts the expected behavior of Internet email service.

Legal

Distributing spam is a criminal activity in the United States, under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 .

References

Links

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