Spam Part 1 - The Spam Mail Crisis
Posted by Steven on April 29th, 2006
Anyone who has been on the net must have at some point in time been afflicted by the infamous problem of spam. For those of you who have been lucky enough not to have had any contact with it (virtually no one i presume) you can read more about it here.
Recently i was wondering what could be the best solution to spam. This lead me to thinking back to the days when i was plagued with spam and wondering what i was doing wrong.
Spam can come in various formats, it can be a popup which shows up when you trigger an event on your pc (Load up a browser page or booting of your pc), or it can be an email which is passed on to your mail account.
Spam mails are to date the most common medium for spam propagation, due to the high number of available email on the web. When a person posts an email to a web site and this is then published to the web via web servers or database servers (or more plainly it is found on some remote web site at the other end of the net), applications which spend all day going round such servers can pickup these addresses and start sending mails to them (Such applicaitons can be running on some hackers machine or else can be viruses propagated in the mail itself).
A possible solution to this problem is to use two email addresses, one for private use which is to be used exclusively for trusted web sites and people in your trusted list, and another for common every day use. This system should eliminate most of the spam in a person’s mail box by restricting the spam to public/anonymous mail boxes.
For those whose mailbox is already overrun by spam, fear not there is a solution for you too. More often than not most users have a very restricted list of people whom they expect to receive mail from. This means that most of the mail in one’s mailbox can be filtered by a number of criteria to determine what is proper mail and what is spam mail. Modern mail applications (including web mail applications) support the separation of mail into mail from known addresses and mail from unknown addresses. This should help the user to concentrate on the mail which is sent from users in his mailing list and can take his time to separate the rest. The second filter which is useful to apply too is to set the application to put mail containing certain words to sentences into a category of their own to be sorted out by the user later on. These filters can then be tuned to suit each users particular needs.
As explained in this post users who use are plagued by spam mail need not despair there are solutions for everyone. There are also a number of more aggressive solutions like Microsoft Anti Spam which I did not tackle in this post. These can be adopted if the above is not enough but as I always have believed, intelligent browsing of the web is always preferable to using aggressive solutions to filtering the web as these can block desired content with the spam content.
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