For anyone with an email account or who spends any amount of time on the web, learning how to reduce internet spam and junk email has become almost a necessity. Take even the less experienced net user and you’ll see that, when asked, they’ll tell you right away what the term ’spam’ means. Why? Because unfortunately, the practice of invading forums and mailboxes with unsolicited ads is incredibly widespread all across the web. But how come the amount of junk mail only seems to grow in time? Isn’t anybody taking resolutions to stop this practice? And how can we effectively avoid it?
The term ’spam’ comes from a the Monty Python Show sketch set in a cafeteria: a waitress would recite a menu in which most items included spam luncheon meat, and she would be interrupted by a chorus of Vikings who would keep singing a humdrum song praising the ingredient, hence ’spamming’ the dialogue.
With the advent and subsequent explosion of the Internet, entrepreneurs soon started to see the Web as an excellent mean of advertising: not only was it cheap (as it involved no more costs than those related to the maintenance of their mailing lists), but it could be used to reach an ever-growing amount of people. Moreover, since the Net is essentially anonymous, it would be hard (and still is nowadays) to hold senders accountable for their actions. Thanks to these and a few other reasons, most of which are valid still nowadays, it is estimated that today 80 to 85% of e-mail messages are unsolicited advertisements.
The previous consideration led software developers to concentrate on the cure of the problem, rather than its prevention, by developing the so-called ’spam filters’, which through some advanced techniques manage to sort the good from the junk on the client, rather than the server, side. Since the technique seems somewhat effective, spammers soon started a ‘war’ at distance in which they kept inventing new solutions to bypass the filters, while programmers learned from their own mistakes to make the filters better and better.
Modern spam filters base their evaluation of a message on different parameters, as experience has shown that junk mail often comes with one or more of these features:
- message consists of just an image (that is, to avoid the filter from checking the content);
- message is missing some headers that would identify the sender;
- message is forged in a HTML-lookalike that makes it difficult for the filter to parse the content;
- message contains extremely unusual words at the top/bottom, and/or has long white spaces within each word.
The latter is probably the most interesting, too. Starting a few years ago, spam filters implemented what is commonly known as a ‘Bayesian filter’. That is, in a few words: after analyzing the content, the anti-spam program will look into an internal database containing a huge list of words. If there is a certain percentage of words in the message that are likely to be found also in a spam message (’viagra’, ’sex pills’, ‘penis’, ‘money’, ‘investment’ and so on…), than the message should be considered as such: by adding unusual words to the bottom of the message, the spammer aims at lowering the percentage, thus passing the filter test.
In the case of messages with long white spaces: there are largely HTML messages containing text parts that are unreadable (typically colored in white) which are put just in the middle of a potentially ’suspicious’ word. This way, the reader displays and reads the correct message, but sometimes the Bayesian filter just can’t figure out which color each input is, and fails to recognize the e-mail as spam.
These are the most common techniques so far. Should we expect more to come? Probably, because the war between spammers and spam filter programmers seems far from being over. Meanwhile, if you want all of your emails to be sent and read properly and not filtered as false positives, make sure that when you write a message it won’t look like any of the above.
Tags: internet spam, junk mail, spam filters
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May 21st, 2008 at 11:07 pm
Wow, they’ve got this down to a science! =P Spam is unbelievably annoying. I’ve changed my e-mail address so many times because of it… I’ve probably had about 15 different e-mail addresses in the past five years. Now I have one e-mail address for signing up at certain sites, posting on forums etc. and one that I only give out to family and friends.
May 22nd, 2008 at 12:07 am
This is a very relevant post as the spam nuisance has been with us for 30 years and it continues to get worse. Spammers are getting cleverer day by day and it is a constant battle for legitimate businesses to stay at least one step ahead of them. Anyway the cat and mouse game will go on - there will be no truce as millions of $ are at stake.
May 22nd, 2008 at 1:18 pm
It seems like the only way to completely prevent spam is to keep a separate e-mail address for trusted family and friends, as Jherek suggested. Even attempting to hide your e-mail address using alternate symbols or words in place of symbols (like AT or [at]) doesn’t help anymore. Every time a new way is devised to help protect again spam, spammers find a way to get past it.
May 22nd, 2008 at 9:06 pm
Well, spam always finds its way to our inboxes. I stopped publishing my email address and using an contact form instead.
May 23rd, 2008 at 7:42 pm
I have a separate email address for spam mail because I can’t stand it! My aol puts things in spam that aren’t spam and then puts the spam in my inbox. It is so annoying and I hate it!
May 24th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
If a spammer does get caught, they are jailed for a long time and fined several millions.
What needs to be done, is that we need to put a COMPLETE stop to dynamic IPs, and ways to mask your IP. That way, if someone spams you, they can get looked up, search warrant, procure evidence, lock the mutha up.
May 24th, 2008 at 11:03 pm
The explanation given was good. I was able to understand some things about spam filters and their workings. I think more information could be provided so that I would have gained much better understanding. As technology develops, spam developers and programmers too will find it increasingly difficult to combat each other.
May 25th, 2008 at 1:31 am
I think the best we can do is to mark them as spam and then they would be sent to the spam box. Any emails that follows with the same email address would then be automatically sent to the spam box. This is what I am doing right now and I don’t have any problem with spam.
May 26th, 2008 at 9:47 am
I thought about checking up in the dictionary and kept forgetting about it. That’s an interesting story on the origin of the word spam. Yes, it has become so frustratingly commonplace that people have started expecting spam and almost stopped complaining about it. I have lost several important emails to spam and to the junk folder as well. Most of the ones I receive fall in the fourth category. Although I haven’t invested in a paid spam filter, any business owner might be forced to buy it the way it’s going at the moment because web mail programs are finding it increasingly tough to counter the spammer onslaught.
May 26th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
I have a friend who used to be an email administrator for a company and she left because she couldn’t stand the thought of having to deal with the thousands of spam emails every day. It seems the spammers are making enough money that they keep doing it — if we could get people to stop responding to spam it might slow down.
May 30th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
I try to stay on top of my emails so that the spam and junk doesn’t become overwhelming. It is a waste of time and a constant concern for me. I wish there were a way to stop it. this article is very informative and helps me to understand what is going on better. Thanks.
June 4th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Dictionary attacks seem to work, my old addy got no spam at all, but my current one gets quite a good bit of it. So yeah, using non-existent words would work quite well.
June 9th, 2008 at 7:27 am
I agree with that. I get a lot like that too. It does get tiring, trying to work through it all, especially when you need to spend your time online doing more lucrative things.
June 12th, 2008 at 5:04 am
Very interesting article. Spam is just annoying and once you beginning getting it in your mailbox spam filters really cannot keep them away all the time. I’ve found out that the secret to avoiding spam is to have a separate email address that is only given out to people I know and I never use that address online. I have several other addresses with I use for different purposes online and which I don’t mind having spam into.
June 12th, 2008 at 11:24 am
I always have a doubt. I have got several accounts which i do not use frequently. But still i wonder how spammers get my account and send mails to me. How does that happen? When my mail id is not known to anyone, how do i get mails?
June 12th, 2008 at 9:19 pm
Separate email addresses is a good advice. I use a couple myself. It works fine so long as you don’t forget your usernames and passwords. There’s no perfect way to be rid of spam. I just try to be careful where I leave my email address when visiting sites. They can’t email you if they don’t know your address.
June 15th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
My number one way of reducing spam in my inbox is by using GMail, haha. It rarely fails, no matter how many spammers seem to target my address. Today, for example, I login and there’s 34 e-mails in my inbox and 283 in my spam folder, all deleted with the simple click of a button.
June 16th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
I have to agree that if you have one email setup just for all the junk then you have your other one for the important stuff you may reduce the amount then you can just empty the junk one. I though have to say that I have had people I know send me junk that I really do not want, but have no problem telling me to stop.
June 19th, 2008 at 10:34 am
I agree with attagirl. I seem to get more ‘junk’ from people I know than I do spam. Or at least it seems that way. I check my email on a daily basis, so I keep on top of the spam pretty well, but I have tried again and again to ask people not to send the the same things over and over, but some people just don’t listen. I would hate to have to tell them to stop emailing me altogether, but I’m fast reaching that point. I do not like the same stupid emails that I get again and again and agian. It is even more annoying than the spam to me.
June 24th, 2008 at 12:27 am
I hate most spam filters! My name is cassiem0221 so anytime I sign anything that way it puts me in spam… and why you might be asking?…. cASSiem0221 … so I’m filtered as a dirty word! Anyhow, I don’t think we’ll ever see a resolution for spam. its never ending and now people can create “disposable” emails where they can just send people whatever they want and a few days later the email account is GONE…