Spam offensive, annoying and costly for most e-mail users but business for few When 30% of all your incoming e-mail is pure rubbish that you dont want, you start getting irritated. When the number is closer to 50% you start getting mad. But when you open your e-mail account and over 90% of your inbox is filled with junk messages from people you don't know or the sender is called xxxxx, you start giving up and find yourself using a telephone or fax to get things done more smoothly. Sounds familiar? For many e-mail users this is already reality - or then will be in the near future. Unsolicited e-mail, better known as spam is making life hard for many private and business e-mail users.What is spam?E-mail spam can be described as flooding users with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it. E-mail spam is in most cases commercial advertising, often for dubious products, get-rich-quick schemes, "financial services", medicals, etc. But the content can also be political or religious. Actually the content is irrelevant, the amount of e-mail sent is more important and that users did not want to receive it at the first place. The main thing is that spam costs the sender very little or nothing to send, but it cost enormously for the carriers (ISPs) to deliver and businesses and home users to receive and process. Carriers struggle with enormous amounts of traffic and associated increased costs while users spend time in separating spam from real e-mail and deleting mails that might offend or otherwise annoy them. Who writes spam and why do I receive it?The big motivation behind spamming is unsurprisingly money. If it is possible to send an e-mail to 1 million people and 5% will buy the product you are advertising, and if sending that e-mail cost almost nothing, there will certainly be many people that are willing to do so. Or similarly someone might like to get a message through - what ever it might be - to as many people as possible without paying much money for it. Also the fine part is that finding e-mail addresses is easy. Just go through the Internet, news groups and www and collect addresses automatically or it is possible to make programs that guess e-mail addresses and just randomly choose millions of different names. It is also possible to buy e-mail account lists from the Internet. Or programs can be written to steal addresses from an organisation that possesses a customer database.When the spammer has the e-mail addresses and the intended message is ready, they need to send the messages somehow. This can be done in many different ways. It is possible to set up a server and send the message that way or a server and service can be bought from someone else. It is also possible to illegally use someone elses domain and server. Possibilities are numerous. Everything goes, as long as millions of e-mails are sent.In the year 2003 the spam situation started to reach epidemic dimensions. Virus writers got the idea to write new viruses in order send spam on behalf of them and their advertising clients. An example of a very widely spread virus that is used to send spam is the Sobig.F. In 2003 hundreds of thousands of home and business users with infected computers started to send spam continuously without even noticing it. For example one broadline connection user can send tens of thousands of e-mails in an hour from one infected computer. Can I get rid of spam?Yes, spam can be stopped almost completely. There are both technical and non-technical things that can be done to reduce spam. Firstly to avoid getting spam, e-mail addresses should not be placed on web sites or news groups or anywhere else where it can easily be found. Also if one already receives spam or other unknown e-mails, do not be replied to any of them or dont follow the URL links in them. Furthermore virus protection and a personal firewall should always be used, in every computer. This way you wont get infected and accidentally start sending spam to others.If you are already having trouble with spam and want to get your e-mail account usable again, then multiple different technologies and solutions are available for both business and home users. The earliest technologies and products used to fight against spam were based on blocking domains and email addresses that were known to send spam. This method is still widely used by some products and vendors but is insufficient today as spam might come from any number of addresses or even without one. These types of systems also require constant updating and would in many cases catch less then 50% of spam.Currently more advanced and best spam detection and removal products are based on rules and heuristic spam scanning engines, meaning that the product automatically knows what many different type of characteristics spam messages have and then based on that information decides if e-mails are marked as spam. Those messages will be then automatically filtered out from the legitimate e-mail traffic. Through this type of approach users can get rid of most of the spam, in many cases around 90% of it. Stopping 100% of spam would be possible, but then also the probability of stopping real e-mail increases. The problem of filtering and stopping legitimate e-mails e-mails that you wanted to receive and they were sent to you wilfully - exists in all spam filtering products.Therefore in good spam detection solutions an e-mail that is considered to be spam is marked as spam by the solution and after being marked these mails can still be delivered to end user for example into a specific spam folder in the users e-mail client. This way spam does not appear in your inbox but end users can still periodically check if legitimate e-mail has been mistakenly sent to the spam folder and then recover any such e-mail from the spam folder to their inbox.F-Secure Spam ControlF-Secure has recognized the growing spam problem and will introduce easy to use, automatic products to help customers in their struggle against mass mailing. F-Secure is releasing these spam detection and removal products during the 1st half of 2004. F-Secure Spam Control will be first introduced to F-Secures home user products delivered through Service Providers. Later during the year F-Secure Internet Gatekeeper and F-Secure Anti-Virus for Microsoft Exchange products will also have Spam Control as add-on functionality. F-Secure Spam Control is designed to be easy to deploy and use and is based on automatic heuristic spam detection technology.Author: Jyrki Tulokas, Business Manager Begin | Back
When 30% of all your incoming e-mail is pure rubbish that you dont want, you start getting irritated. When the number is closer to 50% you start getting mad. But when 
you open your e-mail account and over 90% of your inbox is filled with junk messages from people you don't know or the sender is called xxxxx, you start giving up and find yourself using a telephone or fax to get things done more smoothly. 
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