Spam Facts

Spam has been around since the 1970s, but has become more problematic with each passing year. At times, some email accounts can get thousands of these within a week, if not within a day. How much a person gets depends on how careful they are with their email address when surfing the Internet. Spam can be identified as any unsolicited email message that you do not care to get. That covers a lot.

Spam seems to be free, but it costs Internet providers a lot of money. When information is passed through the Internet, it takes up what is known as bandwidth. This is something that each provider must pay for, and when large amounts of spam go through it, the cost of sending that data is paid by that provider.

The most common Spam is commercial in nature. You may have no interest in Viagra, but spam emailers assume that you do. Viagra and Rolex are the most common things hawked through these unsolicited, commercial emails. It would seem that we all need to be reminded that it is time to take our Viagra.

Just a few people send out most of the spam you get in your inbox. It may seem that spam is sent out from many, many random people, and that can be the case. However, there are a few people who send out the majority of the spam that you get. They send out millions of these messages each day, and are wanted by those that enforce the new laws about spam email.

If you buy from spam emails, you contribute to the problem. If no one were to use these as sources to buy things, spam would not work. That would mean it would all but disappear. Don't buy anything you see through such a message, even if it seems appealing. Go find it through other online sources.

Most of the Spam in the world, billions of emails a day, come from the United States. It is estimated that there are almost 15 billion send out day, and it makes up almost 50% of the email messages all total. Korea comes in second to the United States as the biggest source of these messages.

Once you hit a spam list, you are not getting off of it. Clicking on a link to unsubscribe to spam only means that you have verified your email is active, making your address more valuable to those who sell email addresses to spammers. You are going to have to get a new address to get it to stop.

It can be hard to find out from where a spam email really comes. You can try, however, buy using a free email lookup service to see what comes up with any email address.

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Blog Scammers

By now everybody knows to ignore the 'Nigerian 419 types scams' emails that state either you have won a big sum of money from a lottery you did not even buy or someone in a foreign country needs financial help in order to go through a surgery for an incurable decease. Earlier days people did not know they are just being taken for a ride where most have lost money and even traveled overseas in order to claim their prize.

However now it has evolved to a level that can affect blogs too. Basically what these scammers do is purchase your ad space or your text links and then send you a cheque for a higher price than which was agreed and then their trick is to ask for refund.

Therefore please use your common sense before giving out your advertising space even though your blog depends on the money you make out of blogging.

The most important thing you have to do when dealing with direct advertisers is that you know your buyer thoroughly. No one can deny if you inquire for their URL and anchor text of the target site, and name of the company or individual behind the site and research prior to coming to an agreement. If genuine they will cooperate.

Make sure you make payments through a reliable direct payment method order to avoid the cheques being bounced or do not get cleared at all because by the time you realize that the cheque is fake they will be long gone with your refund.

Albeit direct advertising is more money, stick to reliable advertising sources such as Google AdSense if possible.

You have to be very careful who you deal with because there are no laws made against blog scammers as yet.

You can also find out how you can avoid being scammed while using blog automation programs by visiting www.blogwarriorelite.com

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How to Drive More Traffic to Your Site Simply by Commenting on Others' Blogs

Blogging has became one of the most popular trend in the internet world, you can hardly find someone who is successful online without their own blog. I know it is hard to create a high traffic blog overnight but do you know that you can drive traffic to your site with other people high traffic blog.

This is what most people are talking about "Piggyback Traffic". Commenting on blogs that have huge traffic allows you to piggyback on the traffic of that blog and this can at least drive you quite a number of visitors every month and increase the number of back links to your site. However there are some technique you should bear in mind when you are commenting on other people blog

1) Add comment with value: When I am talking about giving comment on other people blog, I am referring to valuable comment. I have seen such low value comment such as great job! yo dude, how's it hanging that may get your comment deleted by the owner. Moreover, the better your comment, the more highly other readers of the blog think of you.

2) Always make respectful comment: Do not attempt to counter what the blog owner is trying to portrait. If you are unhappy with that post, you simply don't comment on it and you should not try to counter the owner and this will simply get you deleted and blocked on that blog in future.

With these two factors in mind when you are posting comments on other people's blog, you will get higher chance of getting approval from the blog owner and they will also see you as a valuable contributor to their blog.

Now try this method out and wait to see the result it brings to you.

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What Constitutes Email Spam?

You can think of spam as one of the biggest annoyances on the Internet. Though it was once growing at an alarming rate, it has level off recently. That does not mean the numbers of messages sent by spam mailers has gone down, it is just holding. There are about 100 billion or more spam emails sent out each day. These are destined for your inbox if you don't have good online habits or if your spam filter does not work well.

You could say that spam email is any email that you don't want to get. However, that is not entirely true. If you have signed up for a mailing list, or with a company, they have permission to send you email. Even if you get annoyed by these emails, they are not spam. Legitimate companies ask you to opt out if you no longer want emails, but you should never do with if you are not sure where the email has come from. It just verifies your address is valid and active.

You can classify spam email as any email advertisement or solicitation that you did not ask to get. That means you did not purposely give someone your email address to get advertisements from them. Spam mailers get your email addresses from public places online where you have posted yours. That means you should treat it as your cell phone number. Never post your email address anywhere online if you want to keep spam from flooding in.

Spam is also any email that tries to deceive or scam you. If you are lucky, you have never gotten an email telling you that someone from across the ocean wants to give you money for doing almost nothing. You have never heard fake tales of woe about a lost inheritance or dead family members. However, most of us have seen these, and some even fall for them. These are some of the worst types of spam out there.

Any email that comes to you with a forged or hidden email header is also spam. You may not be sure in some cases what you are dealing with. When that happens, you can take that email address and put it into a reverse email lookup to see if you can find out more about the sender.

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What is CAN-SPAM Anyway?

Although the CAN-SPAM act was signed into law back in 2003, I still get email after email that does not comply with the regulations. As the Internet and email became a larger part of everyday American life, spam became a new favorite way for unethical marketers to make quick money. The CAN-SPAM act criminalized SPAM for the first time and finally provided consumers a way to help stop the flood of useless messages in their inbox.

In talking about the CAN-SPAM Act, it is important to first mention what is, and is not, covered under the law. The law covers email whose primary purpose is advertising or promoting a commercial product or service. Therefore, the funny email that you sent to your friend or coworker is not a violation. Also, a "transactional or relationship message" email that relates to an agreed-upon transaction or updates a customer in an existing business relationship is exempt from most provisions of the CAN-SPAM Act. That said, it is still illegal for such an email to contain false or misleading routing information.

The final act was well over 80 pages long, so here is the quick rundown of some of the key provisions.

The Act bans any false or misleading header information. This refers to the "From" and "To" header of the email that identifies the originating domain name and the person that sent the email. Deceptive subject lines are prohibited. It is against the law to title an email about a book review with "Lindsay Lohan Nude Pics".

One more noticeable requirement of the law is that recipients must have an opt-out method in the email. This can be a return email address or an opt-out link. When someone opts to no longer receive your emails, you have 10 business days to stop sending email to that address. Once someone opts-out, you also can't sell or transfer the address to someone else for email purposes.

Probably the most violated requirement is that all commercial email must be identified as an advertisement and must include the sender's valid physical postal address. The email has to be clear that it is a commercial email and the recipient has the option to no longer receive messages from you. If you are sending out to a mailing list, make sure you include your postal address to be in compliance.

The law allows the Department of Justice to seek criminal penalties, including imprisonment, who commit certain violations of the CAN-SPAM Act. There can also be fines of up to $11,000 PER EMAIL! While this act has mainly been enforced against a few mega-spammers, it applies to all commercial emails, including affiliate marketing. The FTC maintains a consumer complain database of violations. Consumers can submit their complaints online at http://www.ftc.gov/spam or by forwarding unwanted commercial email to spam@uce.gov

It is a shame that spammers have made life more difficult for all the honest marketers out there, but it is very important to keep the CAN-SPAM act in mind as you build your mailing list. While the requirements for compliance are small, the potential penalties are not.

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Using the Spam Filtering Service With MS Outlook - Exact Step by Step Procedure

Following is the exact step by step procedure for using the spam filtering service with Microsoft Outlook to block spam emails entering your email:

1. Start Outlook Rules Wizard from start menu by clicking Tools and Rules Wizard. If you are using this wizard for first time it will first display the pop-up message.

2. Select the mail server inbox that you use and click on the new button. You will see a new pop-up window. Now click on the radio button next to 'Start from a blank rule' and highlight 'Check messages when they arrive' from the box below. Click Next button.

3. In the next window you will define the rules for filtering the messages. This window asks you the conditions under which you want spam filter to check the messages. Click and check the box that says 'with specific words in the messages header'. Now click on the next button below.

4. You will notice that the rule description text box on the lower part of window is changed. To use the tags from filtering service to identify spam messages use this: x-Perlmx-Spam:Guage=XXXXXXXXXX. Enter this in the text box and lick on the Add button.

5. Now here you will specify the follow up action on spam mails. Check the box next to 'move it to the specified folder'. Then click on the 'specified' folder active link. Choose the folder where you want to dump junk emails. You can give whatever name you want to the folder. Junk or Spam are the appropriate words for such folder. Click on the next button.

6. Here you can give further exceptions. Once you are comfortable with the exceptions click on the finish button. You can test your rule by sending messages to your email with the filtering text in the message header.

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The New Generation of Spam

Spam celebrated its 30th birthday last month and it's doubtful that anyone that ever owned an email address is singing its praises. In May 1978, 393 employees of Arpanet received the first ever spam email in history from another company called Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) advertising their new computer systems.

Arpanet, a predecessor of the internet, was used by the U.S. Air Force for security research and intended for official government business only. So these unsolicited bulk commercial ads were seen as a blatant violation of the use of Arpanet and it was determined that appropriate action would be taken to prevent its occurrence ever again. That was then... and obviously more wishful thinking than fact.

Thirty years later, sending billions of unwanted emails every day, spammers are trying to sell everything from Viagra to alopecia and weight loss treatments or anything else that might obtain money or personal data from users through deception. The word Spam once only referred to a strange form of meat in a can, but the term was later applied to junk email, referencing a comedy skit from Monty Python's Flying Circus, where all meals in a restaurant come with spam, spam and more spam. Junk email has since become the principal meaning of the word spam. Plentiful but not quite so tasty.

The number of spam emails has grown steadily over the past five years and according to recent data, over 92 percent of all e-mails sent in the first three months of 2008 could be classified as spam. Google, for example, has found that users of its email service, Gmail, receive four times more spam today than they did 2004 and the over all trend is only expected to continue upward.

The methods used by companies to send spam have changed a lot in the last three decades. Thirty years ago the senders of spam email had to type in each address by hand, while today powerful software programs known as botnets perform this task at amazing speed, sending out billions of unsolicited emails a day. But spam took a new step in its evolution in 2005 with the use of images such as GIFs and JPEGs which can easily escape anti-spam programs developed to sort through the text content of an e-mail message.

Spammers have continued to find ingenious ways to circumvent the spam filters, including the use of Word documents and other complex file types such as PowerPoint, PDF and zip files. Compressing the spam into ZIP files renders the e-mail unreadable by security gateways and other spam prevention software because a zip file can only be read once it is decompressed, or unzipped.

On of the more recent trends being used by spammers to get the message through is with the use of the MP3 format. The audio files are actually disguised as music by top musicians, which is usually just enough bait to get most people to open them. Stock spammers in particular have been using this method to convince the email recipient to invest in some obscure stock. Again as with most attachments anti-spam filters do not handle attachments very well because they can't analyze the attachment content.

So why do spammers put so much time and effort into designing such complex files, complete with images and even audio, if the spam can simple be passed through as a text file? While money is always the initial motivation there is apparently the challenge of beating the anti-spam establishment. Spammers admit that spam filters make their job more difficult but at the same time they take pride in the fact that they have never come across a spam filter that they couldn't get around.

Anti-spam technology has made some great advances in the last few years, but stamping out spam has proved far more difficult than originally imagined. Spam filters can give users a sense of false confidence. They can do their job very well but at the same time that can catch some important documents and for a business this can mean considerable financial loss.

As long as a faction of spam recipients not only open these emails but actually purchase product or service or fall for the various scams involved, spam will continue to flourish. But an educated internet consumer can go a long way in helping to quell that growth.

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Why Does Your Business Need a Spam Filter?

Spam plagues email inboxes around the globe. The cost of spam for businesses and individuals can be steep. From unwanted solicitations to identity theft, spam is a serious issue. Endless hours are spent on spam damage control. A spam filter helps to eliminate these annoying and potentially dangerous communications.

Recently Ferris Research revealed the worldwide cost of spam totaled $100 billion in 2007. A spam filter makes life easier by clearing up files. Spam protection also helps ward off possible viruses that may be lurking within suspicious emails.

Almost 100 billion spam emails are sent out everyday. A large number of these emails are sent from botnets or zombie networks. Spam communications include sales of products and services, pornographic content and viruses that can seriously damage your computer system.

More than a quarter of all corporate email received is spam. It takes an average of five seconds to delete a spam email. Hours are wasted deleting spam correspondence when employees could be spending their time performing more productive tasks. A spam filter saves your business time and money by filtering out the majority of these undesirable emails.

Your email address is often posted on your business website. While this makes it easy for customers to contact you, it also leaves your business open to receiving spam. Consider using an alternate email address on your business website so your everyday email box is not overflowing with spam. Have a spam filter in place to filter out the most offensive correspondence.

Make sure you never open spam emails. When you open spam emails, you are likely to receive more or even be the target of a vicious virus. Warn employees to delete spam emails without opening them. Use a spam filter to minimize the problem of processing spam.

Viruses can compromise private corporate data and even cause identity theft. Protecting your business and your customers is of key importance. To have a successful online business, customers need to feel secure about your operations. Getting rid of spam helps your business maintain a higher level of security.

Your business is more productive when less spam is filling its inboxes. For a minimal monthly cost, a spam filter will help to get rid of offensive correspondence. Email should save time and not waste it. Get a spam filter to regain valuable business time and eliminate the threat of unwanted emails.

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Yahoo Email Message Headers - How Do You Find Them?

Few people in the world enjoy receiving unwanted email. Whether it's annoying spam of any variety or something more sinister, sometimes it's only natural to want to know where those unknown emails are coming from. However, if you want to learn more about a strange email address, you might not know where to begin. One place to start is by looking into the email headers of the message in question. Email headers are computer code attached to emails that tell computers where the message is coming from and where it's going. Here's how to implement Yahoo mail to find and use email headers to research unknown emails.

Finding email headers with Yahoo mail is easy. If you're using the New Yahoo Mail, simply view the message you want to open, and look for the words "Compact Header." By clicking on the down facing arrow just to the right of these words, a menu will pop up allowing you to choose "Full Headers." The email headers you are looking will pop up in a new window. If you're using the Yahoo Mail Classic, you can still find email headers, but it requires a few more steps. Choose the "Options" link for the menu bar, and then choose "General Preferences." Find the paragraph entitled "Messages," then locate the "Show Headers" heading and choose "All." Now, go back to your inbox and view the message you're interested in learning about. The full email headers should now be visible.

Finding the email headers is only the first step. Now you have to find out what they mean. Email headers can be tough to decipher because they are meant to be read by computers, not people. If you're trying to figure out email headers, the first thing you should look for is the phrase "Received: from." This phrase occurs every time the message is sent from one computer to another. The first time the phrase was written is actually the last one visible in the headers. Find the "Received: from" closest to the bottom of the headers, and look closely at that line. Next to "Received: from" there's usually a multi-digit number separated with periods. This is the IP address of the computer that originated the message. IP addresses are Internet identification codes that help computers find each other. You can use this IP address to learn more about the computer that sent the message, and possibly the person behind it.

Of course Yahoo email headers aren't the only way to find out more about a mystery message. If you need to find out who owns a Yahoo email address, you can use a reverse email search. Reverse email searches are services that provide information about unknown email addresses quickly and easily. No matter which method you choose, now you should have a better idea what resources are available to you on the Internet.

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Are You Experiencing Excessive Pop-Ups?

Personally I hate Pop-ups. They are everywhere!! They are taking over our computers and the internet. It seems like every single website is shooting them at you. Are you experiencing excessive pop-ups? Are you getting pop-ups on the majority of the sights you visit? Are you getting them when your internet browser isn't even on? If this is the case, pop ups will be the least of your worries. There is a good chance that you have spyware on your computer. I had the exact same problem.

Spyware is a program that is downloaded surreptitiously (secretly) on your computer without your approval. What this program does is spy on you. This is dangerous because it has the ability to track everything you do. It will know which sites you visit, your email content, instant messages, passwords, and it can even obtain credit card numbers if you make a purchase online. Spyware can also have negative effects on your computer. Some of these include, your computer will run slower, it will do wacky things that make it seem like your computer has a mind of its own, constant freezing, and ultimately the destruction of your system. The scary thing is how common it is. 90% of personal computers are said to be infected with this sneaky, little monster.

Some of the other ways to detect spyware besides excessive pop-ups include, your computer runs noticeably slower, it freezes often, your computer seems like it has a mind of its own, your home page will change to an unfamiliar sites, and lastly nothing because some spyware is undetectable. This is the most dangerous because there are no signs of its existence. To diagnose this type of spyware you can get a scan of your system.

There are a lot of anti-spyware companies that will scan your computer for free. If your computer does have it, in order to remove it, you need to obtain anti spyware program. It is best to stay away from the free programs because many have turned out to be actual spyware. Be cautious of what you click because the sneaky menace is everywhere. If you are tired of too many pop ups, and are experiencing these other symptoms you should tend to them right away. They only get worse. Just remember that excessive pop-ups may be the least of your worries.

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Reverse Email Search - Here is a Great Way to Stop Annoying Spam

The Internet and e-mail access have opened up an entirely new universe of communication and convenient discourse to millions. However, all the good they seem to provide can be spoiled by nothing more than an inbox full of spam e-mails. These days, those unwanted and unsolicited e-mails are more than just a nuisance, many of them are illegal.

So how do you go about reducing or eliminating the spam you receive? There are number of things you can do, including conducting a reverse e-mail search.

First, make sure your spam filter for your e-mail is turned on. This will allow you to flag unwanted e-mails, resulting in unsolicited senders being blacklisted and blocked from your account.

You can also report spam to your system administrator, who will able to eliminate the problem. Contacting the Internet provider of the offending e-mails can also be extremely helpful. These providers do not want to be a facilitator of spam, so they are likely to take steps to drop the offending customers.

In addition, you can report unwanted e-mails and spam to the federal government. Make sure you have a copy of the unsolicited e-mail, as well the e-mail address, to send to the proper authorities. Having the name and address of the person or agency that is sending the unwanted e-mails can help expedite the process of ensuring you don't receive them anymore.

A number of Web sites offer reverse e-mail searches that can give you additional information about the offending "spammer." These sites normally offer their services for only a nominal fee. This additional information will speed up the process of helping you rid yourself of spam.

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Stopping Spam in the Era of Social Networks

The rise of sites like Facebook and MySpace has brought surprising challenges for those who want to share their personal information with friends and colleagues. While these sites take great pains to make sure their users are all real humans, it is perhaps unsurprising that spammers have found ways to harness these sites and cause problems for unsuspecting users.

In the past five years, the amount of email spam worldwide has increased by nearly five times. During the same time span, in spite of efforts to enact strong do-not-call list legislation in most countries, those same spammers are harvesting users' private information in order to make phone calls -- frequently to cellphones -- advertising unwanted products and services.

Many services exist to identify and block email spam. Bad emails are increasingly hard to identify because spammers have improved techniques aimed at bypassing filters. Still, collaborative filtering, where users across the Internet identify which emails are spam, is an effective tool for removing spam from most people's inboxes. So, the impact of harvesting personal details from social-networking sites is much less pronounced that it otherwise would be for email.

A different situation exists for those with cellphones and landlines which might receive unsolicited telemarketer phone calls. These calls are almost never invited, and in many cases the recipient has registered with the appropriate do-not-call list to prevent such a call from even coming in.

While many social networks do not allow users to provide phone numbers, with the rise of mobile-phone usage for social networking via SMS, such services are becoming more common. Alongside them, spam text messages and actual phone calls have doubled in frequency in the past five years.

Luckily, there exist services like collaborative email spam filters for telephone spammers. By sharing information based on what the caller said, and the actual phone number the person called from, online users are fighting back to block these calls. One of the most successful of such sites is Telemarketer Catcher, a free social network where users can exchange their experiences with solicitors and spam callers.

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Which Email Client Has the Best Spam Filter?

There are a lot of different email servers out there, so it can be hard to determine which of them is the best at getting rid of unwanted junk mail otherwise known as spam. All email providers have their own version of a spam filter, but they all work in a different way. The options for control over this filter that the user has differs with each different provider too. This all makes it difficult to decide which is truly the best. A few, however, stand out.

Gmail is Google's web based email system. Many who use gmail rave about how well the spam filters work for this email system, though they really don't know exactly how it works. If you look around online, you will see that many say that they trust gmail the most when they want an inbox that is free from all types of spam. Whatever Google is doing in the way of spam filtering, it is working very well.

Yahoo is among the top email servers online, and they are also very good about filtering spam, though not quite as good as gmail. You have some options through Yahoo, and one great one is that you can mark spam that gets into your inbox as such, and that helps Yahoo make their filters even better. Yahoo gives you a junk or bulk folder, and you will find that most of your spam goes right in there, and all you have to do is empty if from time to time.

Hotmail is another web based email provider that many trust when it comes to keeping spam out of the inbox. You can set your account to only receive mail in your inbox from those that you have saved in your contacts, but that can be bad when you want to use your account for business reasons. There are many levels of security from which you can choose, and they work well for the most part. As with Yahoo, some sneaks through, but most is stopped before it gets to your inbox.

There may be times when something passes the filter, and you are not sure what to do with it. You may have signed up to get email from a company, but you don't remember doing it. It can be hard to tell spam from legitimate company emails at times, so you have to think before you deem it spam. Use a good, free email search to see if you can tell where the email really came from before you act.

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SPAM and Your Business

Spam is probably one of the biggest problems that we face in this new technological era. Personally, I receive about 10 junk emails a day telling me about all sorts of rubbish that has absolutely nothing to do with me. Junk email is confusing, harmful and a complete pain in the backside! I have trialled numerous spam filters but none of them seem to work at all. Primarily, I have accounts with Hotmail and the spam filters are really not satisfactory.

I run a small internet business myself and sometimes when I get these emails I am genuinely confused as to whether it is genuine or just absolute rubbish. Some junk email that I get is made to look so convincing I am not sure whether it is a business proposition or if it is someone after my bank details! I cant really tell the difference that easily. Is there anyone out there who knows a good bit of software that could help me out because I am honestly lost in this world of techno jargon! I have recently sent out an email to a company claiming that my domain name was under attack! A firm in China had told me that another company somewhere in Shanghai were trying to register different variants of my domain name.

First thing I did obviously was panic. 'what if this other company buys all my neighbouring domains, I will be ruined!' I immediately checked the availability of the domains through my actually internet provider and none of them had been taken. Much to my own confusion I decided to buy the .com version of my site as that was the most important one that I didn't want to loose. I sent an email back to the company detailing my concerns with this 'company' that wanted to register my domain and I have never heard a reply back. Classic spam story, eh? I was completely sucked in to the email but luckily didn't reply to them with, 'give me all the domains possible!' Fundamentally, that is what they are trying to do. They want your money!

So if you run into any emails threatening the same, IGNORE IT!

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