How To Avoid Getting Scammed

Listed below are some of the most popular and common scams:

1. Nigerian Letter Scam:
This one's been around for many years but continues to flourish. Many of these e-mails claim to be from a person in Africa, usually Nigeria. The writer claims to have access to millions of dollars, either from a relative or from knowledge of an idle account. A percentage of this money is promised to the victim if they will allow the money to be processed through their personal bank account. The victim is instructed to keep their share and send the remaining money to the scammer.

The check given to the victims is fraudulent. The victim is then liable to the bank for the check they wrote to the scammer.

Here's what will happen when you give strangers your bank account information: They will take your money. Period.

2. Phishing Scams:
"Phishing" is a high-tech scam that uses spam or pop-up messages to deceive you into disclosing your credit card numbers, bank account information, Social Security number,
passwords, or other sensitive information.

Phishers send an e-mail or pop-up message that claims to be from a business or organization that you deal with--for example, your Internet service provider (ISP), bank, online payment service, or even a government agency. The message usually says that you need to "update" or "validate" your account information.

Recent phishing victims include Yahoo, Citibank, eBay, Best Buy and Bank of America among others.

If you get spam that is phishing for information, forward it to spam@uce.gov.

3. Chain Letters:
In this classic scam, you're asked to send a small amount of money (usually $5.00) to each of several names on a list, and then forward the letter including your name at the top of the list, via bulk e-mail. Many of these letters claim to be legal. They even include a section of the U.S. Postal Code on illegal schemes. Don't be fooled. They are not legal. And if you participate, not only will you be breaking the law, you'll lose your money as well.

4. Work-At-Home And Business Opportunity Scams:
These scams tempt victims with ads stating "no experience necessary," promise high earnings and claim to have inside information. The scammers usually require victims to pay anywhere from $35 to several hundred dollars or more for information, kits or materials that do not provide the promised results.

Frequently, these schemes involve making handicrafts, stuffing envelopes, medical billing, or state, "Use your home PC to make money fast in your spare time!"

In the craft making or envelope stuffing scam, after paying fees and completing the assembly of the products, victims are told their work is low quality and unworthy of compensation.

Medical billing scams require victims to purchase supplies and lists of doctors who, inevitably don't exist or are not interested in the service.

5. Bulk E-mail Scams:
These solicitations offer to sell you bulk e-mail addresses (spam software) or services to send spam on your behalf. Example: "Reach 100 million websites, $39.95"! The software is usually of poor quality. It's spam and a scam. Don't do it.

6. Auction and retail scams:
These schemes typically offer high-value items, such as Cartier watches, Beanie Babies and computers, in hopes of attracting many consumers. What happens is the victim wins the bid, sends the money and receives nothing or receives products of much lower quality than advertised.

7. Guaranteed Loans or Credit Scams:
This scam comes in a variety of flavors: home equity loans that don't require equity in your home, personal loans regardless of credit history, etc. After you pay the application fees, you receive a letter saying that your loan request was denied. Usually, you never here from these companies again.

8. Credit Repair Scams:
These scams promise to erase accurate, negative information from your credit file so that you can qualify for loans, mortgages, unsecured credit cards, etc. It doesn't work. Not only that. If you follow their advice and lie on loan or credit applications, misrepresent your social security number, or get an Employer Identification Number from the Internal Revenue Service under false pretenses, you will be committing fraud and violating federal laws. Another variation of this scam is the promise of a brand new credit file. Don't do it.

9. Vacation, Sweepstakes And Prize Award Scams:
In these scams you receive notification congratulating you because you've won a fabulous vacation, a car or some other prize award. All you have to do to collect your prize is pay a small fee (usually several hundred dollars). In return, what you end up getting is a toy car, (I kid you not) or a vacation certificate to the Bahamas or some other exotic vacation spot. It's really a lousy deal. You have to pay for your own airfare, and the accommodations that they arrange are usually in rundown hotels. Let the buyer beware!

10. Employment Scams:
Employment scammers take advantage of job seekers. They claim to offer employment services, inside information or inside contacts to jobs. After paying a fee, victims learn they only provide advice, help writing a resume--or less. Some fraudulent employment services simply sell lists of companies that they have gotten from public directories. They usually have not contacted those companies directly or know if there really are any job openings.

11. Multi-level Marketing (MLM) or Network Marketing Scams:
I know I'm going to ruffle a few feathers with this one, so let me just say right now that all MLM or network marketing companies are not scams. Obviously, there are some good, reputable companies out there. However, there are so many bad ones that I'm compelled to include the entire industry on this list. Before getting involved with any MLM or network marketing company, investigate, investigate and then investigate some more. Don't get caught up in the hype. And here's a fact no MLM or network marketing company will ever tell you--not even the legitimate ones: Unless you have outstanding sales ability and/or people skills, it is extremely difficult to make any money in MLM or network marketing.

Here are some other things you should watch out for: Make sure the website you’re visiting contains all three of the following:

1. A real persons name (not just a company or business name)

2. A telephone number

3. A street address (not just a P.O. Box)

If all three of the above are not present, walk away from the offer.

Before purchasing anything, you should always check first to see if the company has had any complaints lodged against it. The following websites publish complaints and/or scams:

http://www.scamwatch.com

http://www.worldwidescam.com

http://www.bbb.org

If you do get scammed, report it to the aforementioned websites immediately. You probably won’t be able to recover your money. Few people ever do. But at least by reporting the crime and making it public record, you make it harder for that company to scam anyone else.

In closing, always carefully investigate any business opportunity, and remember: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is!

About the author:
Dean Phillips is an Internet marketing expert, writer, publisher and entrepreneur. Questions? Comments? Dean can be reached at mailto: dean@lets-make-money.net
Visit his website at: http://www.lets-make-money.net
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Basic Rules of Scam Baiting

The goals of scam baiting carry the pleasure of baiters and their readers. To that end, a general status symbol among scam baiters is the collection or display of a photographic "trophy," a picture apparently taken of the scammer, typically while holding custom made signs, or in odd poses with exact props (such as placing a fish on one's head). Other trophies could include documents such as oaths and the pseudo legal documents, taken as the 419 scammer as a step forward towards a hopeless goal.

There are handfuls on common sense basic rules, which a scam baiter should follow:

1. The first rules is to have a good anti-virus software running on your system all the time and do keep the virus definitions ready. This is must for any computer which has internet connection but it is most significant for the scam baiting.

2. Make sure you don’t believe in anything, which a scammer tells you until you know it is true. In case scammer tells you “here is my photo” you could argue it isn’t. If on Monday the scammer tells you its Monday, check the calendar. It’s possibly Tuesday.

3. Next you should make sure that you do not give any real personal information to the scammer. This needs to be very obvious. Any actual personal information carries your real name, real address, place of work, real bank account number, and personal e-mail address and so on.

4. Remember you should never go to meet any scammer in person, regardless of their location given. As most scammers are just nothing more than pretty cheat artists, there had been many cases of muggings, kidnappings and also murder of people who had gone to meet with 419 scammers. Please do not do it.

5. And the most important rule is, you should never involve directly any innocent third parties in your scam bait. No matter how much you may hate you boss or your ex-spouse, don’t take revenge through this. You should not take on the identity of any real person existing or do not send a scammer to meet with any real person.

About the Author:
Dany Siraz is an expert in analyzing and describing the spam’s that are making the people to fall as prey without awareness, especially the Nigerian 419 scams. He had published many articles about describing the way of spam producers to fraud the people especially through e-mails, and had advised the best ways and tips to escape from these spam frauds. For further more details of Nigerian 419 scam visit to http://www.nigerianspam.com/
Posted: 13-12-2006
Article Source: ArticlesBase.com

The Hidden Dangers of HTML Email

As a veteran Internet user, I can honestly say I remember a time when HTML email was not possible. Back then RTF wasn't available either and for that matter, email programs did not even wrap lines for you or allow file attachments.

Today however, I receive a steady and annoying stream of email in all shapes, colors and sizes. Almost all promotional advertisements and many newsletters come in Html format.

Now, Spam is annoying, Spam in droves even more so, but Spam with "twirlygigs" is intolerable -- and dangerous. HTML is for websites. I visit them all the time and enjoy their various amusements. Email however, is a tool. A communications method used for getting work done. I get plenty of regular email, hundreds of pieces a day usually, due to the support, consulting and writing services I provide. If all of those emails are in HTML format then I'm stuck looking at potentially hundreds of web pages and thousands of graphics.

HTML email takes extra time to download, and for me it takes extra time to read. You see I don't trust HTML email. I've coded many websites in my day and I know that scripts can be hidden in the pages. Now when you couple that fact with the daily news about viruses and worms being sent, well that's just downright scary, so I do not allow my email program to automatically open HTML formatted email. Now I rarely use Outlook and Express (sorry Microsoft but they feel just a bit too dangerous to me now days) however I'd rather be safe than sorry no matter which email program I use. So, I have my email software configured to show all HTML messages as attachments.

Having the email converted to an attachment allows me to immediately see if there are any other files included with the message. And let me tell you, this has saved my butt time after time! I've lost count of how many times I've gotten email with the HTML attached, and malicious code, worms and viruses attached right next to it. If my email program was configured to "conveniently" display HTML as a web page, then a lot of those attached files would have opened on their own and done who knows what to my system.

So, if you receive a lot of email yourself, be careful what you allow to come in. If you run a newsletter or Email update service of any kind, please be courteous and at least ASK before sending HTML formatted email. And when you do have permission to send HTML email, don't include heavy graphics, scripts or other file attachments.

Text may not be as glamorous, but it's a heck of a lot safer and much easier for your readers to glance through.

(c) 2002 Kathy Burns.

About the author:
Kathy Burns-Millyard
Want a Fully Operational Web Site Business in Less than 15 Minutes? Check Out The TurnKey Niche Profit Sites! http://www.GuruGazette.com/TurnKey-Profits/
This article is provided courtesy of The Guru Gazette Niche Marketing Blog - http://www.GuruGazette.com - You may freely reprint this article on your website or in
your newsletter provided this courtesy notice and the author name and URL remain intact.
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Are You A Forum Spammer?

One of the most successful kind of websites for social interaction among people with common interests is a forum. There are forums for every interest in the world and many are used by industry leaders in business as well as celebrities. From sports to gardening, marketing to politics, religion to popular music, every niche has a forum.

For website owners, forums are an opportunity to get more exposure and brand themselves as a expert in their field. Giving advice, sharing stories, networking, and asking questions are the most commonly found content in posts, except for one type...

The Spammer

Unfortunately, many high quality forums are ruined by the entrance of spammers. There are several types of forum spammers, some more subtle and others who are totally blatant. It is generally considered good forum etiquette in include any kind of self-promoting links in your forum signature, a little post that gets added to all of your text posts. These signatures are most often in BBCode and occasionally in HTML.

The blatant spammer will simply use these code in their posts to promote links to whatever site they want. Often this is the case with inexperienced affiliate marketers who don't know how to appropriately promote their site so they post it in forums asking people to visit.

If this tactic ever works it can only be because of ignorance on the part of the forum members. What's worse is that the post is simply the URL embedded with obvious affiliate identity tags and the post itself brings no contribution whatsoever to the community, it's just an ad.

The next step is that these forum spammers figure out that nobody is clicking on their links so the decide that the obvious identity tags in the link are driving people away because nobody wants to be somebody else's money making machine. The now novice affiliate goes and gets a "tinyurl" to hide the affiliate tags in their link and then they start posting that one everywhere, once again, blatantly advertising without contribution. After a little while they figure out that they still aren't getting people to click on their link, and start finally recognizing that affiliate marketers use "tinyurls" like candy and most people know that is a tactic to make the website owner more money and even worse, people feel like the owner tried to actually trick them into clicking on the link.

At this point the affiliate discovers he or she can change the link text so it isn't so obviously an affiliate link, so while the posts themselves continue as ads, the text to click on is no longer the URL but a phrase full of hype that says something like "my program makes me lots of money" (which it usually doesn't) so now they are starting to feel a little more confident. The spammer, however, is starting to realize that the posts are getting lots of complaints and no friends are being made in the community.

The affiliate is starting to realize that people don't want to be sold to on the forums. His intention of capitalizing on the niche is not a problem, but the method of attracting clients is like trying to see the sunset by running east. It'll never happen unless the approach is changed.

The spammer then decides to make a choice. Spam the forum or join the forum for the same reasons the other members of the community do and simply include a subtle link in their signature and actually become a contributing member.

Don't be a spammer, play by the rules. You'll have more friends, generate more interested prospects, and escape being banned from the best forums in the world.

About the Author:
Tyler James Ellison teaches how to make fast easy money online marketing legally using automated systems and guerilla techniques to promote businesses.
Posted: 15-02-2007
Article Source: ArticlesBase.com

Spam Fighting Strategies for Webmasters

Battling spam is just like fighting any other activity that is illegal and needs to be fought in many areas. There are some easy steps that you can take to minimize the impact of spam in your email, as discussed in Part I. However, the webmaster of your email service has many more tools they can use to fight spam.

The effort would be small if a spammer had to collect email addresses one by one. This is why they take advantage of programming that is automated, such as using a spambot. A spambot is a program that looks through Internet websites for legitimate email addresses. These addresses are then "harvested" and put into huge lists.

The best way to deal with spammers is by raising their cost without putting too much of your own effort into it. Some of the techniques described in Part I can also be used by a webmaster.

CAMOUFLAGE

A spambot will only do what it has been told to do through a program. Many times a spambot will pass you by simply if you've disguised your email address. This is because a spambot is usually programmed to search for character strings that look like this: Jane_email@emailaddressdomain.com. You can fool a spambot by changing the email to Jane_email_at_NOSPAMemailaddressdomain.com.

Should the disguised email address be harvested by a spambot it will still need to "scrubbed" before it can be used. A program for scrubbing can be difficult to write since there are many variations that are possible, such as NO_SPAM and no*spam. Try to be as creative as possible.

There is a disadvantage to the above method: you need to remember to take out the extra letters as well as put in th@ sign.

You can make an email address impossible to harvest by putting it into a graphic instead of plain text or mailto:. Not many spambots are smart enough to translate a graphic and understand the pixel pattern as text that is usable. This is particularly true since graphics can have many shapes. Again, this method can be inconvenient because you won't just be able to reply to this address or copy and paste it.

Another approach is to get rid of the accessbile and visible email address completely. You can use a form for feedback that stores data in areas where a spambot can't search. You can also store the data inside of easy to write code that is difficult to decipher due to encryption. An example of this would be javascript.

BARRIERS

Communication becomes more difficult between trusted sources when visible email addresses are hidden in graphics or banned from visibility. You want to hinder the spammer by putting a block on any spambots that are known.

Many times they will have a signature that is easily seen through an IP address that is well known or a process name (and sometimes both). Other times they can search for User-Agents that are a non-browser form.

Webmasters can easily block IP addresses as well as block any unwanted processes. The webmaster just needs to begin a cron job that will scan the network for the name of a process and then terminate any IDs that are associated with the process.

A more experienced webmaster will have a daemon that will sleep until that time when a process name is noticed. The daemon will then "wake up" and terminate the process before any spam harvesting can occur. Sample programs, which are only a bit harder to implement, can be used and are available online.

You can get traps for spambots that will block any request that is incoming simply based on search patterns and behaviors. This method to fight spam is slightly more difficult to set up and attend to because it needs certain patterns to define it, changing the pattern slightly for different spambots. How-to information and sample perl programs are available online.

RAISE THE PRICE

After time most spammers will tire of trying different variations in programming just to get email addresses, making the reward much less than the effort. This is what you want to do: make the spammer cost much higher than the reward which will make your reward much more than the effort.

A spammer won't give up until there is no profit in the effort. US legislation, such as CAN-SPAM, has only seemed to deter businesses that are legitimate and that were never the guilty ones to begin with.

There are, however, some things being done to reduce the problem of spam to just an annoyance: there are penalties for sending spam, filters for junk mail are becoming smarter, and there are proposals underway that include needing a mailer ID.

This is all bad news for the spammer while at the same time is great for the rest of us computer users.

About the Author:
Paul Wilcox writes about internet security solutions for the Internet Cyber Security website. Sign up for our free newsletter at http://www.internetcybersecurity.com
This article was posted on September 15, 2006
Article Source: articlecity

How to reduce spam

SPAM is the one thing that is certain with the Internet, and there are few people who have not experienced at least one spam email. Whether annoying or time-wasting, or actually offensive and rude, follow these steps to eliminate it.

Spam type number one- random attacks

Many spam is just sent to random addresses, in the hope of someone receiving them. Try these XX tips to stop random attack spam

1. Do not have a catch-all email address

A catch-all email address will receive all email sent to your domain that does not have a email address set up for it. For example, lskadjfh@yourdomain.com will go to catch-all-email-address@yourdomain.com, whereas a legitimate domain, such as sales@yourdomain, will go to the actual sales@yourdomain.com account.

By turning off a catchall email address, you will greatly reduce random attack spam, since you will only receive the mail of a legitimate address. This does however mean that if a customer sent an email to saels@yourdomain.com by accident, they would receive a mailer-daemon return email, and may be discouraged from buying from you.

2. Do not use common email address

Spammers know that email addresses like sales@your-domain.com are likely to be in use, so target these addresses specifically. Use different addresses to stop this, such as salesdepartment@your-domain.com. This will stop all random attack spam if used in conjunction to tip number one, however as soon as a spammer discovers your new email address, you will need to change it. However, this may pose a problem to a customer when they try to contact you. An auto-responder telling your customer who to email may help, if they email the wrong address.

Spam type number two- targeted spam

The other type of spam is when a spammer discovers your email address from somewhere, and sends email to it.

3. Do not post your email address anywhere on the Internet

Spammers use a spider to collect email addresses from the web, and can discover your email address easily, if you post it. Always either post it as email at your-domain dot com, or better still, use JavaScript to disguise it (scripts are available at javascript-source.com) or post it as an image. This is a very effective way of stopping spam.

4. Always select NOT to have your email address passed on when entering your email address on a form.

This will stop spammers or even legitimate companies from emailing you. Never give an email address to a site which doesn't look 100% legitimate, as they may spam you. Remember, once one spammer has your email, they will sell it to other spammers.

5. Use a spam filter to reduce spam that reaches your inbox.

They use a number of techniques to decide whether an email is spam, though are occasional wrong, and so could lose you legitimate emails. Good ones to use are MailScanner, and SpamAssassin.

These tips, if follow, should reduce the amount of spam reaching your inbox by a significant amount. Think about doing the following two steps to stop spam for everyone.

6. Sign up to Spamcop

If signed up to Spamcop, you can report all spam to it. It will then find out which data center it was sent from, and will stop the spammer from being able to send spam from that location. While it won't reduce spam to you that much, it will reduce spam in general, so consider signing up to it.

7. Place a random email address link on your website

If you have a website, consider linking to a random email address script- this will fill the mailing list of the spammer with useless addresses, wasting their time and possibly crashing their server. Ones to use are at www.iwebtool.com/webmasters/antispam/ or www.bfndevelopment.com/cgi-bin/home/Members/fMail/Contacts/13647/List.html

These tips will all stop spam from reaching you, and will help stop the spread of spam on the Internet. One day, spam might not be around... but until then, have fun spam busting!

About the Author:
Tim Shaw is CEO of Big Wow Web Hosting, a cheap and reliable web host. Visit them today for cheap web hosting, and email customer support with coupon code MS10 to get 10% off MailScanner, and stop spam from reaching you.
Article Source: http://www.articles2k.com

How to Avoid Spam Complaints in your Emails

Spam filters are responsible for deleting a high percentage of legitimate business emails from people who have no wish to spam. Here are some tips to avoid spam complaints in your emails or ezine.

Avoid the following triggers in your emails.

1. Excessive use of ALL CAPITALS in the subject line and body of your email.

2. The use of words like "free"(used alone or in combination with words like "trial","money", "quote", "sample", "membership", "access" etc.) Other more obvious word to avoid include "sex", "XXX","spam", "$$$", "checks", "money", "extra income", "as seen on TV". Even seemingly harmless word such as "search engine listings", "cable converter", and "reverses aging" will get you in trouble.

3. Excessive use of exclamation marks "!!!"

Tips for Staying on the Right Side of Spam Filters

1. Use words like "news", "newsletter", "list" in your subject line.

2. Say how often your ezine is published in the subject line - weekly, monthly.

3. Put date of newsletter in subject line.

4. Put issue number in the subject line.

5. Ensure your newsletter is a proper ezine with some substance in the text.

To help identify spam in your emails/ezines use the following spam checker always before you send anything out.

http://www.merchant-account-service.com/stop_spam_mail.html

Above all, use your common sense. We know what spam looks like, so avoid anything that resembles it in your ezine.

(C) John Lynch

About the Author:
John Lynch
Learn how to Make Money Online by subscribing to Free 6-part 'Internet Marketing Explained' mini course. Get 6 free Internet Marketing E-books; free autoresponder; and free trial top-notch website. http://www.merchant-account-service.com/internet_marketing_explained.html
This article was posted on November 05, 2005
Article Source: articlecity

Stop Spam With Disposable Email Addresses

Spam is an unnecessary evil that bugs anyone with a computer. Yet there are many ways available today by which you can avoid being “bugged” by spam, which has the potential to completely destroy your data and your computer. The oft-used methods are filters, blockers and other programs which almost all e mail service provider can offer. You may now go for another very innovative way to avoid spam. It is called “disposable e mails”.

The basic methodology by which these disposable e mail addresses work, is that after it receives a certain amount of spam messages, it automatically destructs itself. It might set you wondering whether this means that you have to keep on changing your e mail addresses all the time. This is where the disposable e mail address add value. After you opt for a disposable e mail address, you are given one with a specific user name. your address depends on the user name.

You will then give your e mail service provider some keywords, which enables the provider to send you mails only from those sources you approve of. These keywords are based on their names or whatever you choose. So when you give your e mail address to someone from whom you like to receive mails, it will contain those keywords in the address, so as to allow them to enter your inbox. All other mails reach your other e mail address which goes through constant change for you to view them. If you ignore them for some time, they get automatically deleted.

This unique e mail , though keeps on changing, you can access it through your user name and password. By using this tool, you can always ignore the spams and not worry about them again. Of all the methods available, which wages a war against spam, this happens to be my favorite. This service of course dos not come free but it costs the same amount of money s you would be spending for your paid e mail services from the ISP. Since it saves you the worry of constantly worrying whether your computer is gong to crash because of spam, and you don’t have to spend endless hours sifting through the junk mail, I feel this is a cost worth incurring.

About the Author:
Jeff Clark is a staff writer at Technology Digest and is an occasional contributor to several other websites, including Games Enthusiast.
Article Source: http://www.articles2k.com

The 4 Ws of Junk Email

Junk e-mail or spam has become the scourge of the modern computer world. It eats bandwidth. Spam is like a disease. It doesn’t care about age, religion, wealth. It doesn’t discriminate. Junk e-mail affects us all.

There are 4 keys to the junk mail question
– Who, What, Where and Why.

Who they are
The typical profile of a junk mail sender is as follows. Male, 18 – 30 years of age, single, technically competent and with little regard for their status as a public nuisance. There are female junk mailers out there but, unfortunately, this is predominantly a male preserve.

What they use to send spam
There are many tools available to the spam merchant. The main ones are e-mail extractors, newsgroup harvesters and CD lists. E-mail extractors are programs which wander around the Internet gathering e-mail addresses from websites and often from web based forums (unprotected forums). A “good” e-mail extractor can gather 15,000 e-mail addresses per hour. Newsgroup harvesters are programs which search through newsgroups for valid e-mail addresses. Most newsgroups users are aware of this and take measures to counteractthese harvesting programs. Despite these measures a newsgroup harvester application can gather 20,000 – 30,000 e-mail addresses in an hour. CD lists are one of the worst sources. 90 million e-mail addresses available on a single CD for as little as $20. A lot of the addresses on these CDs would be junk (many would no longer exist) but an equally large number of theseaddresses would be valid. A CD like this is a junk mailers dream.

Where they do it from
Those involved in sending out bulk e-mail are “entrepreneurs” or at least they think so. The vast majority of those involved in the spam business are self-employed and work from home. Sending spam is almost the ideal home based business. You name your hours and the business itself is almost automatic. Maximum gain from minimum effort.

Why they do it
Their motivation is money. Considerable amounts of cash actually. Each spammer who sends out 1,000,000 junk e-mails is certain of approximately 100 sales. Many of the products they sell are worth $50 - $100 dollars to them in commission. Yes. Shocking isn’t it? The average bulk mailer earns in excess of $100,000 per year!
Maximum return for minimum effort. Unless of course you get caught and get jail time.

About the author:
Niall Roche
This article was submitted courtesy of Spam-Site.com which reviews spam blockers and also offers advice on stopping spam for free.
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Those Annoying Spam Emails

Commonly referred to as spam, unsolicited commercial email is becoming a big problem today. If you’ve ever had your email address on a spam list, then you know how annoying it is to have to wade through dozens of advertisements to get to the mail you want to read. Although there are laws in place, it is unlikely that people who send spam will adhere to these laws so your best defense is to filter as much of it as you can through software and protect your email address from being added to more lists.

What Spam Looks Like

Usually the emails are from some fake looking name and many of them may have subjects that try to lure you into opening them by promising a stock tip, pretending to be your friend or acting like they need information for an application that you never filled out. When you get an email like this that seems suspicious it is best to just delete it.

How Did They Get Your Address In The First Place?

Sadly enough, most spammers got your email address because you gave it to them! Sometimes when you order something your email gets sold to a list, but most times it is harvested from a web site. If you have your email listed in an online advertisement, on a website or have published it in a forum, it is likely that it will be harvested for one of these lists.

Unfortunately, once your email address is out there you will not be able to get it removed from their “list”. There is no point in replying to the spam or trying to use the unsubscribe button as the spammer has no intention of removing you from his list and in fact, by acknowledging that you received his email you are giving him incentive to send you more mail and possibly sell your email address to other spammers. Your best defense is to get a good filtering software and filter out as much of it as you can.

Protect Your Email Address

One thing that you can do is get a second email and only give that out to people you want to receive mail from. Reserve the original email for use if you need to have an email to order online or subscribe to a site. Other things you can do include:

Not answering spam emails
Never have your email address visible on any web page
Do not use an auto-responder when you will be away from your computer
Do not pass along chain emails

About the Author:
Lee Dobbins
Visit http://www.spam-canned.com to find out more about spam and how you can protect your email address. Browse the free article database at http://www.spam-canned.com/spamarticles1.html
Article Source: www.iSnare.com

All About Spam

Spam is annoying. Period. Why people would want to send all of us stupid messages about buying prescription drugs or getting some outrageously good mortgage rate is beyond me. Well, not really.

You might ignore those emails. But not everyone does. And that's why they're sent. Emails cost so little (or nothing) to send. So sending out a million of them could be a cakewalk. Let's say one out of every 1,000 recipients falls for their ploy. Someone just got 1,000 new customers!

How in the heck did those spammers get your address in the first place? Well, they actually use a variety of techniques. They use programs called spambots to search the web and pick up any email addresses that could be listed on websites. They use what's called the "Dictionary" technique, where they take a well-known email extension (earthlink.net, for instance), and make up all kinds of possible user names to go with it. For example, with me they could try the usernames "kara", "kara1", "kara2" and so on, until they can confirm one of those connected to an earthlink.net extension is a valid email address. Kinda like going page by page through the dictionary.

Ever fill out a registration form on a website and find a little checkbox, probably near the bottom, asking if you want to receive additional information, newsletters, or something of that nature? Often the box is checked, and in order NOT to receive the info, you have to UNCHECK it (or else). Well if you miss those types of boxes on the wrong kinds of sites, your email addresses may be handed to spammers on a silver platter. Well, almost. Often a zillion email addresses are sold for next to nothing to spammers on CDs. (Couldn't you almost call those silver platters?)

Many internet service providers (those guys that keep you connected to the internet so you can send and receive email) use a variety of methods to block spam before it ever gets to you. Nevertheless, we all know that some spam inevitably gets through to our inboxes. That's when we need to take a proactive stance and install some sort of software to filter it out!
© 2005 by Kara Glover

About the author:
Kara Glover
For help on installing anti-spam software, check out this article on Kara Glover’s website: http://www.karathecomputertutor.com You can also find more articles, tips and tutorials on topics such as Microsoft Word., Excel, and PowerPoint there. Kara is a Computer Tutor and Troubleshooter.
Feel free to reprint this article in newsletters and on websites, with resource box included. If you use this article, please send a brief message to let me know where it appeared: kara333@earthlink.net
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URL: http://www.karathecomputertutor.com
author photo: http://www.karathecomputertutor.com
date of copyright: March 2005
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Spammers Use Subliminal Messaging To Push Their Wares

Report On New Spam Tactic

Anti-Spam experts at SophosLabs startled the world with a news item in the month of September (2006). Their systems detected a new kind of spam mail that uses animated graphic images to lure their customers.

Nothing earth-shaking, one would say. One has learned to live with the nuisance; they are like flies hovering around your face, which you simply wave away with your hand. The reason why this news became sensational and got picked up by all the news feeders was because of the word "subliminal" in it.

The news item that the spammers wanted to spread (and that got detected) was on Trimax Corporation, a small-cap stock. Such campaigns are dubbed "pump-and-dump" stock campaigns by people in the know. The trick the spammers deployed this time however, was to compose the main ad as a GIF image. After doing so, they went one step further and composed three other frames; each of these frames were of the same size, same color level and same format as the frame for the main advert (basic prerequisites for an animation to occur). These other frames had the word "Buy" placed randomly in two different hues, with and without exclamation marks for added emphasis. In the GIF construction program, they set these frames to appear after every ten to forty milliseconds. So, when the advert appeared in the mail, you got to see the main ad, and then these lil "Buy!" frames popped up every now and then.

Cool, eh! There are quite a few of these lovelies in my spam box, as I write this piece.

Cat And Mouse Game

It is the same cat and mouse game. As anti-spam filters become stronger, spammers keep cranking newer and more creative ways to beat them.

Up until two years ago, majority of the spamming community used text to communicate their love to us. Beginning last year, they came up with GIF messages which timid text-oriented filters couldn't block. When anti-spammers built their OCR (optical character reader) plugins that were capable of looking at GIF spam eyeball-to-eyeball; along came these animated GIFs which did the same thing - communicating their love to us - but now with a song and dance.

The trick that gives the spamming side an edge - for the moment, at least - is that the latest version of anti-spamming OCR plugin apparently only looks into the first frame for specific keywords ["BUY" is a keyword! :)]. After having satisfied itself that the first frame is innocent, it waves ahead the entire cargo. And there it lands in your inbox, waiting for you to open it!

Is It Truly Subliminal?

By its very definition, for a message to be truly subliminal, the hidden text/ image should not be discernible to the conscious eye. But the offending advertisement's BUY message is. And since it is visible, even if the anti-spam filter allowed it into the inbox, you as an intelligent reader can immediately make out that the message is spam. Whatever value the "pump-and-dump" spammers wanted the TRIMAX stock to shoot up to, I am sure it may not have succeeded. Or perhaps, may it have? (The latest ticker on Trimax is here.)

By setting the delay period for successive frames to appear to even less value, would it have been possible to flash the "BUY" messages without the eyes consciously detecting it? Meaning, would the message have become truly subliminal? Would they have achieved what they wanted to achieve? Gaaa! When is the next anti-spam version due???

The Controversy Continues

The advertisers are out to get Subliminal Messaging by its balls, really. Right from the word go, sensationalism has followed subliminality like a faithful dog. Whatever be the motivation of the likes of James Vicary or Vance Packard in the fifties, or the spammers in the twenty-first century, their shenanigans have only served to give subliminal messaging a bad name.

It is like a double-edged sword. Used correctly, subliminal messaging can be, and is, a good self-development tool. So while the spammer-antispammer battle continues out there, let's improve and enrich our lives with those beautiful audio and visual CDs!

About the Author:
Sanjay Agrawal is a Business Coach and self-development enthusiast. Get rid of the pain and the hurt in your life by listening to some excellent audio subliminal messaging CDs available here. Want a visual version that achieves the same thing while you are working on your computer? Get this.
(The complete news from Sophos, including the offending ad, and views & comments from the experts, may be viewed here.)
Copyright 2006. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Reprint Rights: You may reprint this article as long as you leave all of the links active, do not edit the article in any way, and give author name credit.
Article Submitted On: October 26, 2006
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/

Arm Yourself! To Win The War Against Spam!

Unfortunately, fighting SPAM has become an ever increasing challenge in every day online life! :(

Even with the passage of the CAN-SPAM legislation which took effect in the United States in January of 2004 (see http://www.spamlaws.com/federal/108s877.html ), ,this does not seem to have diminished the volume of *spam* at all (as you may also see in the article "CAN-SPAM legislation proving useless against spam" at: http://www.newstarget.com/001412.html ) and appears to have simply "pushed the spammers offshore" :(

I, personally, used to receive over 200 spam messages just overnight while I slept in just one of my email boxes! :(

However, by helping you Arm Yourself with the proper tools and techniques, in this article, we hope to help you Win the War against SPAM!

Although, there are many differing opinions regarding the definition of what is and what is not SPAM, we do not wish to enter into that debate in this article. Rather, we will define SPAM simply herein for the purpose of this article to mean "any unwanted email message".

So, if you didn't ask to receive "an unwanted email message", of whatever kind, then ...
How did these "spammers" get your email address in the first place to sent it to you?

Well, there are many, many ways in which spammers can get "a hold" of your email address :(

Every time you post a message in an open forum wherein your email address is "visible", there are those spammers that go and "farm" these email addresses from these public forums and send spam to them.

Every time you register your email address at a site that does not "promise" not to share it with or sell it to someone else, that site may be selling your email address to a spammer.

If you have your email address explicitely stated in any of your web pages, even just in the HTML and perhaps not "visible" on the page as such, e.g. in a field, there appear to be spammers who go and "farm" email addresses straight out of your web pages' HTML and send spam to them too.

Once one of them has got it they seem to tend to share, sell, etc. your email address with even more spammers and on and on it goes.

So, does that mean you should stop posting messages in public forums, registering at web sites and/or making your email address available through your web sites?

NO! ... Absolutely Not!

Why should we relinquish the battlefield to the *spammers*?
When by Arming Ourselves with the right tools and techniques, we can Win the War against SPAM!

So, how do we Arm Ourselves against SPAM?

As the saying goes ....
"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure", right?

So, let's start Arming Ourselves by discussing the ways in which we may prevent spammers from getting a hold of your email message in the first place.

You may wish to limit your posting of messages in open forums wherein your email address is "visible". You can disguise (or "munge") your e-mail address when you post it to newsgroups, chat rooms, bulletin boards, or other public forums For example, you can give your e-mail address as "wh0Am1@example.c0m" by using the number zero instead of the letter "o" and "1" instead of "I". This way, the reader can interpret your address, but the automated programs that spammers use cannot. And you may wish to only register your email address with web sites, etc. whom "promise" not to share it with or sell it to anyone else.

However, again, I "bristle" at the thought of letting the spammers win and in any way curtailing my online activities and/or force me to relinquish any benefit of our wonderful online / virtual world due to their unscrupulous behaviour! ;[

Preventing spammers from "farming" your email address(es) out of the HTML of your web pages is a much easier weapon to weild to prevent unscrupulous spammers from getting a hold of your email address(es) in the first place.

There exist some very nice and easy to use tools that will help you encrypt your email address such that you may include it (encrypted) in the HTML for your web pages, your visitors may still click on your email links to mail to you and spammer won't find it to "farm" for their spam mailing lists! One such email address encrypter that we use regularly and recommend is the HTML E-mail Link Encrypter, which is one of the many webmaster tools and utilities you may get as part of your copy of the Fast Selling Software (see below).

Despite our best efforts at prevention, it is still highly likely that some spammer somewhere will eventually get a hold of your email address and start spamming you, and as we mentioned before, once one spammer has got you on their spam list :( ....

Thus, despite all of our preventative measures, it is unfortunately most likely an inevitability that you will receive some spam sometime.

Therefore, we also need to arm ourselves with the weapons to combat spam whenever it "shows its ugly face", right?

Even though the spammers may have gotten a hold of your email address, there are weapons we may employ such that you don't even ever have to see most of it! :)

Some of these "weapons against spam" employ an intermediate email box wherein any email message sent to your email address from an unknown sender receives an automatic "challenge/response" message requiring them to go to a site, where they must verify themselves as a legitimate email sender, rather than some kind of "spam-bot", e.g. by typing in a "verification password". Then you receive only those messages from verified senders from this intermediate email box. IOHO, one of the best of these type of "challenge/response" intermediate email box systems, which we use, have been pleased with and therefore recommend, is Spam Arrest, for which you may find out more information and try it for yourself for Fr^ee via the information and link in the resource box below.

These type of "challenge/response" intermediate email box systems are great for eliminating spam from "spam-bots" and/or when the sender and/or reply-to email addresses are not "real people". However, there are still some spammers that will "pass the challenge" and then you will have to manually go up and "block" those senders from your seeing any further messages from them.

Similarly, if you own your own domain / web site(s), some web host providers offer spam blocking/ filtering that you may use for your domain. Some of these types of spam blockers / filters also allow you to enter regular expressions to determine all of the senders addresses and/or messages containing a particular "string", matching the regular expression "pattern" entered, to block. These types of spam blocking/ filtering are great to combat spammers who use multiple sender and/or reply to email addresses that change frequently and/or randomly (and probably automatically generated), but from a common domain and/or with a definable pattern. However, these types of spam blockers/ filters often require that you log into your domain / web hosting account and add a filter for each spammer's set of sender addresses and/or matching message text to be blocked.

Therefore, an even better weapon we have found, use and recommend, for "stemming the flow" of spam, is a PC / client based application called MailWasher, which is one of the many very helpful and beneficial tools in Vcom’s SystemSuite for which you may find out more information in the resource box below.

MailWasher is great because it allows you to quickly and easily distinguish "friends from foes (spammers)", "bounce" unwanted email messages and "blacklist" the spammers such that you don't have to hear from them again!:) ... and all from your PC! When you "bounce" a spam message the sender of it receives an automatic response indicating that your email address was "not found / invalid". Therefore, rather than receiving verification of a valid email address, as from a challenge/response system or removal request, the spammer is more likely to believe your email address is invalid and remove you from their spam list! ;) When you "blacklist" a spammer in MailWasher, it automatically "tags" all of their messages to be automatically "bounced" and then deleted. Further, MailWasher allows you to combat spam on any number of your email addresses, again all from one place / application.

We have effectively employed all of these weapons against spam and have successfully reduced the previous torrent (of over 200 spam messages per night in one of my mailboxes) to a mere tickle and are definitely on the way to Winning the War against SPAM! :)

We hope this all helps you all Win the War against SPAM! :)

- Michael S. DeVries

About the Author:
Michael S. DeVries is the Moderator of The Virtual Consulting Discussion List (http://www.TheVCF.com/vcdl.phtml) and Principal of The Virtual Consulting Firm (http://www.TheVCF.com). You too can Arm Yourself with these weapons and Win the War against SPAM!, at: http://www.thevcf.com/vccenter.phtml#SPAM
Article Source: www.iSnare.com

When Hormel Takes The Fight Out of Spam

In the past few years Hormel Foods Corporation has been doing the legal rounds in preventing software companies from using the word "spam" in the branding of their junk email fighting products. An Associated Press (AP) article recently said Hormel was afraid this practice of software companies may dilute its brand name.

It is totally understandable that Hormel is merely protecting one of its most treasured brand names. They are afraid that the day may come when people will start wondering why they named their product after junk email. Maybe Hormel is just not giving people more credit. Or maybe they know something that experts in the information technology (IT) arena have known for a long time.

The topic of junk email prevention has fallen under the broader category of computer security these days. In fact some will say that email security is one of the IT manager's worst nightmares. Emails are a common venue of computer virus infection. Virus makers are coming up with newer and more sophisticated means of exploiting email as a way to defraud users. One of the causes of today's rash of identity thefts comes by way of email, more popularly known as phishing email scams.

Ask any IT manager what their take is as to why so many users become victims of computer viruses or online fraud. Their answer will invariably be along the lines of "user habits and reckless behavior". To reinforce this, a noted German network security expert said this past week in an IT conference held in Australia that it would take twenty to thirty years to educate people about computer security. It may sound exaggerated but it certainly reflects the frustration of an expert towards why users make it easy for attackers to compromise their computer systems. Actually it need not take so many years for people to learn but their very habits and behavior impede the learning process.

Consider why there is so much junk email floating around, many of which have probably found their way into your inbox. It is because of the user's habit of forwarding email to everyone in their address book just because a line in the body of the email tells them to do so. Consider why there are so many victims of email scams nowadays. Because when an official looking email arrives, say from their bank, telling them to update their account information and password, the user's impulsive behavior takes over and they go do as they are instructed. There is also this prevailing "it couldn't happen to me" mentality and that is precisely the kind of behavior that cyber criminals pounce on. The common denominator here is that the user has this habit of not going the extra mile in doing some sort of checking first.

Securing your personal computer will take only twenty to thirty minutes. There is no dearth of products around that will help in securing your computer. Notwithstanding some IT experts' criticism that some of today's security products are inadequate, they are still your best bet in preventing your computer being compromised. Leave the research to them to come up with better products.

So when Hormel Foods wants to dissociate their Spam brand name from junk email prevention software, they probably know that given the average computer user's lack of regard for computer security, the day may actually come that these same users will think they named their product after junk email. After all, the Spam brand name has been around for almost seventy years and it would not be that successful if Hormel Foods did not know a thing or two about consumer habits and behavior.

About The Author:
F. Aldo
Webmaster of Virus Protection For Beginners and just happy to be of help! Come and share your computer security articles with us.
Article Submitted On: October 13, 2006
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/

How Spammers Obtain Your Email Address And Why They Send Spam

You probably know that Spam is unsolicited and undesired e-mail message. Spammers are the people who send Spam. Spam is a serious problem. It is important today as never before because almost every other email message we receive is Spam. So, the question arises how spammers get your email address and why they send you Spam. Spammers can obtain your email address in three ways.

One way is to guess a mailbox name for a publicly listed domain name. Many organizations have the email addresses where the first part of the email address is a general word such as "info", "sales", "accounts", "support", etc. People often use the email addresses beginning with their first name, for example, John, Sandra, Julia. Spammers simply put the first names before the @ symbol followed by a domain name, and get possible email addresses.

Secondly, spammers can gather email addresses from the Internet. They use programs that search web pages looking for email addresses. If there is your contact email address in your web site, or if the email address is embedded into your profile, your email address will be obtained by spammers. The third way to get your email address is to buy email lists. Some dishonest companies can make money by selling the customer's information to spammers. Spammers can also bribe unscrupulous employees of companies to get a copy of the email list.

Once spammers got a list of the victims' email addresses, they start spamming. They do it to make money. In general, there are two kinds of spam messages:

1.Offering trashy and fraudulent goods or services (e.g. Viagra, Cialis, medications, fake Rolexes, software programs, etc.)

2.Stock scams working on "Pump and dump" schemes. Spammers encourage you to invest in a particular company's stock, in order to quickly inflate its value and enable the spammers to make a fast profit.

By sending their undesired messages spammers have for an object to contact thousands or even millions people in the hope to hit one or a few dolts who actually will buy their crappy products. No dolts, no spam. But out of a million people, you will always find one or two.

Most of the Internet protocols that computers use to talk to each other are anonymous. Your email server thinks that any email server connecting to it over the Internet is giving its name properly and that the email it sends is legitimate. Spammers abuse this trust relationship to send you their garbage. The Internet protocols cannot be changed in a moment so we need another solution to the problem of spam.

Legislative attempts produced no effect. It's not easy to track a spammer located in USA sending spam using a mail server from Russia to mailboxes in Australia. Spammers are also known to use Trojans to hijack one's computer and make that person send spam on behalf of the spammer. The "victim" doesn't even guess about it. These people would be caught up in any comprehensive Spam legislation.

However that may be you can take some measures to protect your inbox against spam flow by yourself. There is a wide choice of anti-spam products available on the Internet. You only have to choose the right one to block Spam before it reaches your inbox. There is no guarantee that you will get absolutely no Spam but at least you will reduce its amount.

About The Author:
Julia Gulevich
Author is a technical expert associated with development of computer software like AATools, G-Lock EasyMail, Spam Blocker. More information can be found at Anti Spam Filter Resources
Submitted: 2006-10-26
Article Source: GoArticles

What You Need to Know: CAN-SPAM Laws

Anyone doing business online and using email for marketing needs to know about the CAN-SPAM laws.

Smart online marketers use "permission" marketing: you invite potential customers to join your email list, and offer a newsletter, a special report, or a sequential series of messages to form an e-course. The recipient "opts-in" to the list by replying to an invitation and subscribing. By "opting in", your subscriber is telling you it's OK to send email. They've given you permission and your email messages are not considered spam.

But most people don't really understand what constitutes spam. If you're in business for any length of time on the Internet, you may encounter false accusations of spam simply because people forget they opted in receive your message. To many people spam is simply an unwanted message.

This can cause problems for you with your email service provider. You must be able to prove that you haven't been sending unsolicited email. Your proof lies with the list management system you use that tracks invitations and opt in responses.

Here's what you need to know about the law is so you can rest assured that you aren't breaking it.

CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) establishes requirements for those who send commercial email, spells out penalties for spammers and companies whose products are advertised in spam if they violate the law, and gives consumers the right to ask emailers to stop spamming them.

Simply put, here's a rundown of the law's main provisions:

It bans false or misleading header information. Your email's "From," "To," and routing information must be accurate and identify the person who initiated the email.

It prohibits deceptive subject lines. The subject line cannot mislead the recipient about the contents or subject matter of the message. Subject and content must match.

It requires that your email give recipients an opt-out method. You must provide a return email address or an automated way for your subscriber to opt out. You must honor the requests.
When you receive an opt-out request, the law gives you 10 business days to stop sending email to the requestor's email address.

It requires that commercial email be identified as an advertisement and include the sender's valid physical postal address. Your message must contain clear and conspicuous notice that the message is an advertisement or solicitation and that the recipient can opt out of receiving more commercial email from you. It also must include your valid physical postal address.

One of the best and most efficient systems with a minimum of complaints is the ecommerce system, www.KickStartCart.com . They automatically include CAN-SPAM compliant features when they send out email broadcasts. Furthermore, if you import a list of email addresses into the system each recipient will be required to confirm they want to be on your list. All potential recipients must respond to a confirmation email in order to be included in an email list. This is called closed loop or double opt-in and is further assurance against people using the system to spam or send unsolicited messages.

While the respectable business community strives to be compliant, the spammers find new ways of circumventing the laws and jamming up email inboxes with junk. Unfortunately spam filters never do a reliable job of keeping the spam out and are more likely than not to keep legitimate email from being delivered.

The best assurance against spam complaints is to use a reliable system such as KickStartCart, and to send out valuable relevant content to your subscribers. The ratio of information to promotional messages should be in the neighborhood of 80-20 or 75-25.

As a serious business person using the Internet and email, it's important you comply with the laws so you can avoid getting in hot water with your service provider and keep your subscribers happy.

About The Author:
Denise Wakeman & Patsi Krakoff
For more leading edge Internet Marketing tips go to http://www.biztipsblog.com. You can also subscribe to The Blog Squad's ezine Savvy eBiz Tips at http://www.savvyebiztips.com. To learn more about using social media tools like blogs, go to http://www.buildabetterblog.com. Denise Wakeman and Patsi Krakoff are Internet Marketing experts and are known as The Blog Squad.
Published 09/27/2006
Article Source: http://www.EzinePlug.com

Identifying Spam When it Arrives

Most of us have opened our email program and found, alongside correspondence from people that we know, offers for products from commercial web sites. Some of these emails we expect. We have asked to be notified of sales and other opportunities or joined a mailing list offered by the company. Many times, however, the offers are from companies that we have never done business with and may have never even heard of. This is Spam, unsolicited bulk email, and can quickly lead to a massive overload of your inbox. thee are people that have reported receiving upward of 200-1000 pieces of spam per day.

Identifying Spam as soon as it occurs is the first step to preventing it from happening again. Once your email address is in circulation with these companies, you are well on your way to a very nasty problem. Advertising from legitimate companies is one form. The rest are for illegal services, pornographic material, questionable products, and fraudulent schemes. It is invasive and many times illegal. Spam is the worst form of junk mail and a typical reason why many people have to change their email addresses.

In best cases, the clue can be found in the subject line. If you are offered quick money or a chance to find your long lost high school classmate, you can probably guess that it is Spam. You may be amazed that, as you read your email, that these companies claim a right to send you this email because you have a relationship with one of their "partners" or "affiliates". All that this may mean is that they bought your email address from another company with dubious privacy policies. It is still Spam.

Spammers will try to trick you. Unfortunately for us, Spammers only need a response rate, by some estimates, of 0.0001% in order to be profitable. This means that they will use practically any measure to get you to open it before hitting the delete button. You may receive an email from Grandma or one asking for help in the subject line. Before you know it, you are reading their advertisement, if only out of curiosity. These spammers can be trickey.

Check the dates and times on any email that you are unsure of. These companies know that many email programs will sort the inbox by the earliest mail sent. As a result, they place false send dates and times on their Spam hoping that you will open them first.

The worst has to be the ones that seem to come from companies that you know and trust. They may claim to be from your internet service provider in the subject line or have a similar address to that company's name. It may look like it is from the accounts payable department of a major law firm. Spammers count on your curiosity and hope that you will respond. Even if you don't buy anything, they now know that your email address is connected to a live person and, if nothing else, can sell that address to someone else.

Read the To and From fields in any questionable email that you receive. If the To field is empty or filled with an anonymous address, then you have Spam. An anonymous address is typically something like freeoffer@happydays.com. An address from someone that you do not know through an account at hotmail, yahoo, or msn is probably Spam. These are anonymous, easy to get accounts that spammers use and then discard when they are done. By the time the Service Provider has been made aware that spam is originating from these accounts, the spammer is gone. Scrambled, random addresses (X12YT853@yahoo.com) from accounts like these are definitely not to be trusted regardless of the content.

Finally, if the email contains a story in which you are asked to do anything to help anyone, check the story out online. There are several great websites like truthorfiction.com that will help you sort through any potential scams or hoaxes perpetuated through email. These stories can range from silly pranks to dangerous fraud schemes and may need to be reported to the proper authorities before someone, like you, finds their bank account drained.

About The Author:
Keith Londrie II is a successful Webmaster and publisher of spam-resources.info A website that specializes in providing tips to help eliminate and avoid spam. Getting rid of spam that you can research on the internet in your pajamas from the comfort of your own home. Visit how to combat spam Today!
Article Source: http://www.articles2k.com

Securing Your Email In An Insecure World

Computers have simplified millions of people's lives. With the advent of online technology we can be more productive in the office, organize household matters, and communicate with others around the globe. Do you ever think it's all too good to be true? Well, you'd be smart to question the overall ease and efficiency of the web. The sad truth is, along with these perks there are a few major pitfalls. And if you aren't aware of them now, you may be in for a rude awakening.

So many people get excited about the wide-reaching possibilities of an email system. Indeed, it is staggering to think about how you can connect with someone on the other side of the world with just a click of a button. Unfortunately, however, sometimes by clicking the mouse you are doing more than reaching out to a faraway friend. You may also be inviting email viruses and scams into your mailbox.

What is spam anyway?

Email spam is also called unsolicited bulk email - like junk mail in your computer system. In other words, it is email that you have not asked to receive. When we say "bulk email," we are usually referring to one message that is sent to more than 200 email recipients at a time.

How is spam targeted?

Basically, if you participate in any newsgroups, forums, or post your email address on a personal or professional website, you can be targeted for spam. A spam mailing list will be created by combing electronic newsgroups and mailing lists, or by conducting a broad address search online via "spambots" that roam the net collecting email addresses.

What is phishing?

Phishing is a relatively new form of email scam and it's a serious one. What it refers to is an email that claims to be from a legit corporation (like Citibank, PayPal, eBay etc.), but it is really a spoof. Phishing can be tough to spot because it can look pretty slick. The email will come with a return address, a logo or a brand that seems on the up-and-up, links to other sites etc. But whoever is behind the scam is trying to get your financial info and rip off your identity. Studies show that 5% of the people who receive these fake emails respond to the "phisher."

Now that you know what these terms mean, how can you avoid dealing with them?

Clearly, the answer is with an expert email security system. No doubt, new scams will be popping up before you know it. We haven't even discussed the horrors of email "worms" and "viruses."

What can be done?

-Use a web host with a secure email system that will control spam, maintain your privacy, and protect you from email viruses. A good web host believes that all individuals have the right to send and receive secure emails around the clock.

-The first step is to monitor the spam that comes into your email mailbox and then report any scams to the Anti-Spam League or the Anti-Phishing Working Group.

-Be wary of any emails that ask you for your personal information, especially financial details. Do not give out your credit card or bank account info unless you are on a secure server.

-Be wary of email attachments. When in doubt, don't open them!

-Make a point of checking your account balances online to see if there are any sudden withdrawals that you did not authorize.

-Use anti-virus software and be sure to update it regularly (such as Microsoft patches).

-Think about installing a web browser tool bar that will alert you if a known spammer or phisher is trying to reach you (such as Earthlink ScamBlocker or eBay's tool bar).

About the Author:
Madison Lockwood is a customer relations associate, specializing in small business development, for Apollo Hosting. Apollo Hosting provides website hosting, ecommerce hosting, vps hosting, and web design services to a wide range of customers.
Content Provider: http://www.my-articles.com

Understanding How Spammers Work Can Save You Time And Reduce The Spam You Get

Nobody likes receiving spam and having to spend time dealing with it. Even with sophisticated filtering and avoidance mechanisms discussed in my previous articles entitled "Use A Spam Filtering Tool To Manage Spam And Save Hours Everyday" and "7 Steps To Effectively Take Control Of Your Inbox And Reduce Spam", these unwanted spam messages keep on appearing. By understanding how the system works, we can effectively take steps to significantly reduce the amount of spam that we receive daily.

What we have to understand is that email marketing is by far the most effective way to promote products and services on the internet today. The basis of this system it to collect as many email addresses as you can and repeatedly send email messages out to them. There is a legitimate way to do this and then there is the way spammers do it.

The legitimate way is to collect email addresses only from people who volunteer it to you on a website in return for some information that you offer. In addition to this every email sent out must include a link or instructions on how to unsubscribe. I would take it one step further and say that unsubscription must be instantaneous. Having to wait for a few days is unacceptable with the software tools available today. Following this method, you will only receive email messages that you have opted-in for and as soon as you are not getting any value out of it, you unsubscribe.

The spammers mode of operation is to collect email addresses by any and all means available. This could be by building software spiders to crawl websites 24 hours day looking for email addresses on any page. Usually they search for the HTML tag "mailto:" but as users have stopped hyperlinking in response, the spiders are getting more sophisticated and are putting together text like "john dot smith at domain dot com" into the proper valid email address "john.smith@domain.com". Some websites list all their employees contact emails on one page and is a prime target for spam. Harvesting guestbooks where emails are displayed is also a very common practice.

Other methods are more malicious and involve virus-like or worm software being installed on your computer and feeding the names in the address book back to a spam server that collects them.

Spammers trade email addresses for money. This is why the system is out of hand - it is an income producing activity. Every email address has a value to it and no matter how little the value, putting together a list of 100,000 can provide a neat income for a spammer. Most spammers have spam lists many times larger than this.

Spammers also include the unsubscribe link at the bottom of spam emails. These links when clicked and actioned, tells the spammers that this email address actually got through to a live person and that email address is now moved onto a much higher value list and is traded for more money. Those of us who have actioned these links have found the flood of spam coming in to vastly increase within only days.

So now to the question of how to use this knowledge to reduce the spam you get?

First, understand that everytime you give out your email address to a website, that it can potentally be sold and traded. Therefore, if you are unsure about it, use an email address that is not your primary one. Webmail services like Hotmail and Yahoo Mail are perfect for this. You only get the messages when you want them and log into those services. I've used a Yahoo Mail address for this for years now. Everytime I log in there are more than a thousand messages but the one that I want to look at is at the top. I never have to delete these messages, Yahoo takes care of it automatically. The only requirement is that I log in to the service within a set period usually 90 or 120 days to keep the account active.

Once you are comfortable that the site concerned is legitimate, you can then change your email address to your primary one. On the other hand, if you start getting spammed, then you do nothing, let the spam emails build up and get deleted automatically by the system.

In my article entitled "7 Steps To Effectively Take Control Of Your Inbox And Reduce Spam" I discuss an elegant way to safely give out email addresses and shut them down in case they get spammed. This is by far the most effective method that I have used.

Other things to watch out for?

Spammers are facing tougher times and they are finding it harder to get new email addresses. While this is a good sign that means the general public are getting more educated, it does mean that we have to be careful of where our email addresses are shown or advertised. For example, magazines and newspapers often are great places for a spammer to collect email addresses. This is a much slower method but if we think about it, these email addresses are of much higher value because somebody has paid money to advertise and so it is bound to be a real address. This means that we have to think laterally in order to stay ahead of the spam game.

Last but not least, we can surely help significantly reduce the problem by not responding to any spam email message whether it is by clicking on a link, replying to the email or unsubscribing using a supplied link. If you really must look at the site, just type in the domain name part of it into your browser and leave out everything after the domain name. This will take you to the site without the spammers tracking identification code.

Together we can surely put a dent in this system by understanding it and staying one or a few steps ahead of spammers.

About the Author:
Balraj Dhaliwal is an Internet Consultant for BSD Domain Registry, a well respected and liked domain and hosting provider because of its no nonsense simple approach to getting things done. Visit BSD Register at http://www.BSDRegister.com
Article Source: www.iSnare.com

Why most anti-spam systems don’t work and how to get an effective anti-spam solution

The problem of spam has been getting worse. In recent years spam has been an annoying nuisance such as advertising. During 2006 there has been a considerable worsening of the problem with an enormous increase in the number and sophistication of fraud, being perpetrated through spam.

I first became aware of how serious the problem is when I received an email which advised me that an additional person has been authorised to access my online bank account. I am fairly computer literate and well aware of the common deceptions which are delivered by email, but this one looked particularly convincing. So much so that I phoned the bank to check if it was real (of course it wasn’t genuine).

I thought, well, if someone as computer literate as myself could be even half-convinced that the email was genuine, undoubtedly some of the novices on the internet would fall for the trap. If the spammers send out a million emails, they only need to “play the numbers” to uncover a few naive internet users who will fall for the spammers criminal tactics.

I then asked around some of the most computer-literate people I know. Several of them had fallen victim to scams. There is no doubt that these criminals are getting much smarter and more sophisticated in the types of frauds they perpetrate.

For example, one of the most highly computer literate people I know recently fell victim to scam which was related to eBay. He had recently purchased an item on eBay. Shortly afterwards he received an email asking for his credit card details. As the two events happened around the same time, my friend mistakenly thought that the spam was a genuine request from eBay for credit card details. After a day or so my friend realised his mistake, but meanwhile he was defrauded from his credit card account.

Stories abound about people who have fallen for quite simple frauds, such as the Nigerian scam. I believe people need to have some level of common sense to avoid scams as obvious as those. Of greater concern is the new spate of sophisticated spam scams.

Spam statistics show an increase of 30% in the past year. Today, 80% of the email in the world is spam. Why is spam increasing so fast? The answer is simple. Spam fraud is a huge success for the criminals behind it. The more profitable the fraud, the more the criminals will invest in developing smarter methods of stealing money from you.

To make matters worse, some of the people who sell protection software are allegedly the same people who are spreading the problem. There have been some notorious cases of people and organisations who develop new viruses and also sell the anti-virus solutions.

What can you do to protect yourself?

Companies such as Symantec www.symantec.com are selling protection software. (By the way I am not suggesting for one moment that Symantec are doing anything disreputable). But, is a software solution the right way for you go? After all, you have to install it. The other concern about software solutions is that in order for them to work you have to firstly bring the spam into your network. There are many disadvantages to this, including that the traffic itself clogs up your internet link and your server. Also, once the spam is inside your network or your computer, if the spam filter does not deal with it correctly then you will have to deal with the consequences.

I believe there is a simpler and smarter way to protect yourself against spam. The answer is anti-spam managed filtering services. These services come in a couple of different types. Some of the anti-spam services are marketed to large business and government clients.

There are also some anti-spam services which are designed for small to medium businesses. It is even available to individuals. One of the most effective systems for small to medium business is the SpamDetour service – the worldwide link is www.spamdetour.com. In Australia the link is www.spamdetour.com.au

SpamDetour requires no installation or configuration and is therefore suited for people and/or organisations with little or no computer / internet skills.

The biggest advantage of spam filter managed services over software, is that the managed services keep the spam far away from your network and/or your computer. Would you invite criminals inside your house and then deal with the problem of removing them? Obviously not. You would keep the criminals as far away as possible. Yet that’s how most anti-spam systems work; they bring spam into your network to be dealt with. Managed anti-spam services work in a completely different way to software based anti-spam systems. The managed anti spam services create a new location for your email domain, which is generally at an Internet Service Provider site. This acts as a spam trap. Then, once your email reaches the spam trap the filter takes over and directs genuine email to the real user, and it directs spam to a storage area on the anti-spam managed service server where it cannot do any harm to you, the user, or to your business.

Of course, no anti-spam system is 100% accurate. From time to time it is possible that a genuine email will be classified as spam, or that spam will sneak past the filter and reach into your computer or your network. Still, this is much less likely to happen with a managed service than with an in-house spam filter.

The best anti-spam managed services on the market allow you to log in and check your spam to pick up any errors in the system, add blacklists and whitelists, fine tune the system. If you find any genuine emails on the anti spam database you can pick them up from the spam trap and direct them to your own network and computer.

If you are a high-tech internet user, a computer specialist or a large organisation you may well have your anti-spam protection strategy worked out. On the other hand, if you are an individual or a small to medium business then an anti-spam managed service is a simple, practical and cost effective solution.

A major benefit of the anti spam managed service is that it saves time. If you add up the millions of people who have to manually pick spam out of their email every day, waste time dealing with fraudulent spam, read unwanted advertising etc., the cost to the economy is enormous - billions of dollars each year.

Some of the anti-spam managed services offer a free trial or money back guarantee. I believe that anti spam managed services, with the anti-spam technology provided by experts are the only way the world is going to combat the problem of spam.

About The Author:
Michael J. Wilson is an accountant living in Sydney, Australia. One of his interests to develop the internet for the purpose of providing genuine benefits to the community, and to reduce exploitation of the medium.
Article Submitted On: October 13, 2006
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/