|
|
Let’s fight SPAM
All those who use electronic mail are vulnerable to unsolicited commercial emails called spam.
Apart from getting bigger and more unruly for the internet as a whole, the phenomenon has become a problem for the individual as well as corporate users. The major free web-based email service providers (AOL, MSN, and Yahoo!) are vigorously upgrading their network spam protection systems in an effort to restrict the ever increasing number of spam bouncing around the internet all the time and save their networks from crashing and their subscribers from the invasion of unwanted mails. After beefing up its anti spam efforts, AOL alone has announced to have blocked as many as one billion spam emails in a single day in March 2003, up from the average 780 million spam messages a day it was blocking in February.
What is spam?
The lingo spam was coined to describe the indiscriminate and internet-wide experience that refers to, “unsolicited email on the internet. From the sender’s point of view, it is a form of bulk mail, often to a list culled from subscribers to a Usenet discussion group or obtained by companies that specialize in creating email distribution lists. To the receiver, it usually seems like junk email. In general, it is not considered good netiquette to send spam. Some apparently unsolicited email is, in fact, email people agreed to receive when they registered with a site and checked a box agreeing to receive postings about particular products or interests,” reads Whatis.com.
Patty Furgosen, a die-hard techie adds via email, “It is almost impossible to tell which unwanted mail is a true spam, especially for those who happens to be on the internet a lot and sign up for things online. Many a times unwanted email might not be spam. True spam is email sent via bulk mailing lists that may not have anything to do with what one ever signed up on the internet. Purchasing email information from those where one signs up or many other sources generate these bulk mailing lists. It is not spam if it is not a bulk mailing list. One single biggest sign of spam is that there is no way to unsubscribe.”
Target audience
When the internet changed from an academic and research network into a commercial tool, the wonderful utility of electronic communication became easy and economical method for spamming. Commercial spammers as well as some non-commercial users started taking advantage of the email as their personal medium to publicize any thing they want to promote: hoaxes, ideas, products or services regardless of “netiquettes,” traditional societal courtesies and or established marketing methods.
Techies and internet savvy community like to use email services for setting up virus free multiple email accounts though it take more time, navigation, and procedure as compared to client-based services. The email service providers have ultimate control over incoming and outgoing mails, which implies that the users of these services will keep receiving spam, no matter what. The spam filters of email providers may be effective but will let their own spam through as well as spam from their business associates who pay the providers will also find way to inboxes of the subscribers.
The free rider spammers (individual sending spam using PCs, portals using spam for promotion or contractual third parties engaged for sending out spam) are very innovative as far as seizing of email addresses is concerned. It is often difficult if not impossible to tell how spammers acquire even well guarded email addresses in the first place. For the most part, websites offering promotional newsletters and commercial mail sometime violate the choices the subscribers exercise while registering.
In some cases, the sites also have hidden options about use and mutual sharing of email addresses with other partners that most users fail to notice. Then there are newsgroups and directories. Surprisingly, the chances to receive spam are there even if the email address has not been shared in any way. But systems used by spammers are not very wise as far as the target audience is concerned. One may find “Dear Mr. johartown” in place of name (read as personal name of the account holder from the email address)?
Fighting spam
Some spam may also carry embedded virus contents that cause damage to the networks or users’ computers. Since the abuse of email facility started, network administrators and internet users have been devising various technical methods to overcome this problem. Whereas individual users may use filters, software, simply delete spam without opening, bear with unsolicited traffic spending Internet time while deleting them and may have a very cautious approach while using their email addresses, network administrators are deploying increasingly sophisticated range of technologies to detect and block an even increasingly sophisticated and proliferating community of spammers. So far, the spammers have been ahead in the race. According to a report by an Internet security firm, “28 per cent of email is spam or junk.” The effects of the spam may be network outages and congestions in the face of increasing demand for faster and bigger bandwidth by customers where as to sender it cost almost nothing. Spam is unique in that the receiver pays more for it than the sender does.
Filtering firm Surf Control that compiled a list of the top 10 most annoying spam messages (from free adult site passwords to copying DVDs in one click) sent across the internet in 12 months (2002) estimates that that “spam costs businesses around the world about $9 billion a year to deal with.” Pakistani businesses so far are not adding much to the bulk of spam flying around the cyber space. But the net users, individual as well as corporate, in this part of the world are equally exposed to the nuisance as users in any other part of the world are. Some Pakistani businesses have already deployed system wide spam filters to protect themselves. But the individuals mostly are unprotected and local ISPs are not very receptive to the complaints on the subject. Which is why an internet user in Multan keeps getting offers to buy a house in Miami not to mention more bizarre offers?
At the same time, another phenomenon of chain emails is growing rapidly among the local internet community. A chain email is a message that is sent to several persons with a request that each person send a multiple copies of a letter to various people so that its circulation increases exponentially. Chain letters are not spam as they are mostly from someone known (friend, collogue, or relative). Forwarding emails is another pursuit popular among young users as a part of peer-to-peer sharing or those senior users who believe in some thing and think spreading it will help the cause. Emails received on wide range of matters from phony claims, religious, philosophical, political messages, apparently lucrative, quick fix offers or punchy love lines and scanned pages of Urdu poetry are found in the email inboxes and the worst is that most of the time they are forwarded (with prefix Fwd:) from those who are known contacts so one finds it hard to ignore them out rightly. And that is what makes these mails harder to avoid.
Mail filters
So what users can do to have an email accounts just for own use and not for spammers? The business can (and should) deploy system filters and fight the evil at organizational level. They themselves should have commitment never to resort to spamming. Individuals may try this: In addition to some disposable accounts for “hit and run” strategy with spammers, have one account with no online subscriptions, set the filters on highest level provided, and add the addresses you want to communicate with. Chances are that spam or chain letters will not pour into that account, or at least they will be manageable and will not clog Inbox if it is not emptied for couple of days for any reasons. Think if spam cannot be managed, the email may lose its utility.
The writer
|
|
|
