War against spam…
The majority of us get spam every day. Some of us get a slight, and some of us get a bunch, but if you have an e-mail account it is always there. An example, just today here’s one came to my Gmail inbox:
Subject line: Monday trade notice
Keep Your Eyes Open Monday For News From SREA
SCORE ONE (SREA.OB)
Current: $0.10
This one always climbs after big news. Beat the news to the market, grab
SREA at open on Monday.
Evidently this is spam, however it made through the spam filters and I opened it because the subject line made it unknowable whether it was spam or not.
What is spam?
Spamming is defined as an abuse of electronic messaging systems to haphazardly send unsolicited bulk messages. Most of the recognized form of spam is an e-mail spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, search engine spam, spam in blogs, mobile phone messaging spam, internet forum spam and junk fax transmissions.
Spam is flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it. Most spam is commercial advertising, often for dubious products, get-rich-quick schemes, or quasi-legal services. Spam costs the sender very little to send — most of the costs are paid for by the recipient or the carriers rather than by the sender.
How to filter spam?
Spam filtering software is somewhat like Beverly Hills liposuction, the process of filtering or removing unwanted email from specific area of your email account, only that liposuction is a surgical process and removes unwanted fat not unwanted emails. (big grin)
Spam filter software is currently available to stop spam is spam filtering software. The simplest filters use keywords such as “Viagra”, “porn stars”, “sex”, etc., as the subject to try to identify and remove spam. These easy filters are simple to avoid by spelling. “Spam” as “s-p-a-m”. And mostly, it blocks the real email that you want to receive. For instance, your friend send a copy of the movie reviews, “sex in the city”, the filter blocks the email for the reason of the word “sex”.
And more advanced filters, attempt to take this simple approach to a certain extent to statistically identify spam based on word patterns or word frequency; however there are still ways to get around them, by using short messages.
One message received! Check your inbox, if it’s a spam…delete it!…that’s the best thing to do for now.
