Avoiding Spam Mails

Today, spam is a problem of immense magnitude. Every day billions of e-mails go out, of which 80-90 percent are junk. The problem is taking even worse proportions. Spam emails, these days, are designed to campaign more than traditional supplies of illegal drugs and spurious body enhancement items. Given that, spam is not something new.

Mark Sunner from MessageLabs said 'pump and dump' is one kind of spam and currently it is most prevalent. News.bbc published this in news on April 27, 2007.

In the common pump and dump spam scam, bulk e-mails artificially raise the share value of a small not so known company. The spammer already acquires this company's stock. When lot of people believe in the stock campaign and start placing orders to buy the shares, the stock value rises in the market and the spammer takes this opportunity to sell his stocks for profit.

Ironically, the share rates elevate only slightly as is evident from tracking the shares after enough people fall for it.

Mr. Sunner explained brute-force in e-mail terms. In this someone sets an e-mail account and calls it say abcd1234@. Since it is not a name it is difficult to guess the sender. Still it begins to receive spam.

Phil Watts of SoftScan advises users that when they receive a spam mail in their inbox, they should not click on it. By opening such e-mails there is automatic download of images or everything that is attractive about the e-mail. But at the same time the spammer gets to know that the user is reading the message and probably there would be a response. News.bbc published Watt's views on April 27, 2007.

According to experts at MessageLabs, spam is no longer just a nuisance. It is something more fearsome.

A MessageLabs report found that world spam in total e-mail traffic from new and unknown illegitimate senders in April was 76.1 percent that was a 0.9 percent increase over March. Virus laden e-mails from new and unknown illegitimate sources going to valid recipients was 0.69 percent that was a decline of 0.003 percent from March.

Related article: Aviation Hacker under Arrest in Greece

» SPAMfighter News - 5/5/2007