How can YOU stop SPAM
December 4th, 2006 by JeffWhat four-letter word is the bane of everyone’s day? If you guessed SPAM, then you were right. First of all, I am not referring to the processed ham made by Hormel®. Current, widely accepted estimations assert that at least 90% of all email sent today is SPAM.
What is SPAM?
Before you can stop SPAM, you first have to understand what SPAM actually is. According to Wikipedia, spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited, undesired bulk messages. This is most commonly thought of as SPAM email. SPAM email is also referred to as unsolicited commercial email, or UCE. As you can tell from this latter title of SPAM, spammers operate for financial gain. There are several ways to make money by sending SPAM emails. One such way would have a spammer send a SPAM email to a few million email addresses. This particular SPAM email would contain an advertisement for a product. Other types of SPAM emails, known as phishing emails, seek to collect your personal information, and use it to gain credit under false pretenses, or other illegal methods of getting to your money.
Why is SPAM a problem?
Most people today know what SPAM is, and know that it is annoying, but SPAM is a major problem for today’s world. The major impact that SPAM has is in lost productivity. Every email message that a user has to spend time determining whether it is SPAM or good email is time that could be spent doing something productive. Another issue with SPAM is the security risk that it poses. While phishing emails try to get you to share your personal information with a third party, another danger is the viruses and malware that comes along for the ride. SPAM messages that do not necessarily advertise a product or try to get you to give a third party your online banking information tend to spread viruses or other malware. Also, SPAM is a huge problem because it costs YOU money. This cost is not apparent because you are not directly charged for each SPAM email message that is sent. However, SPAM takes up additional bandwidth that would not otherwise be used. This additional bandwidth gets charged to the customers of the ISPs that you use to access the internet. Also, your email hosting and filtering providers end up charging more so that their email servers can handle the drain that SPAM emails cause on them. It seems evident that SPAM is a major problem.
How can YOU help stop SPAM?
SPAM is a problem that sometimes requires the work of large companies, and of individuals to solve. The first thing that everyone should do is to ensure that their computer is secure. You can do this several ways, but the first is to invest in a good quality antivirus product and ensure that it scans your computer on a regular basis. You may also want to install adware and spyware scanners to ensure that you keep as much malware off of your PC as possible. It turns out that there is a huge amount of SPAM email that comes from computers that are running some kind of malware. There is one other thing that you can do to reduce the amount of SPAM email that is sent, but first, we need to understand the motivation of a person that sends SPAM email. Let’s just say for a minute that a spammer sends out 10 million SPAM email messages per day. Also, out of the 10 million people that get these email messages, that 1% either open the email, click on a link in the email, or click on the link in the email and buy a product that is advertised in the email. As a result of the 100,000 people that did something besides delete the email, the spammer will get $0.01 per person that performs one of the three actions above. If this were true, then this spammer would make $1,000 per day to just have a computer that is running a program to send out SPAM email messages. This same spammer would make about $365,000 per year on 10 million email messages per day. This example has greatly underestimated the number of emails that a typical spammer sends, but it is obvious, spammers send SPAM to make money. The easiest way that people can reduce the amount of SPAM emails is to immediately delete any email that is looks suspicious and that may be from people that you do not know or normally interact with. If you perform these two simple steps, you will be well on your way to helping reduce the amount of SPAM email messages that are sent.