STOPPING SPAM

Spam has existed for about as long as the Internet has. Across the Internet there are various ways in which spam can be posted. Spam in the form of emails remains the most dominate type of spam present on the Internet. 90 billion spam emails sent daily worldwide; a figure that that has more than doubled since 2005 at which point it stood at 30 billion.

As well as spam emails, spam can be seen across the Internet in the form of various aspects of media such as, websites, guestbook's, forums and link spamming, Link spamming is when a normal link is manipulated to take you to a spammer's site so that the site gains more hits and therefore increases the sites page rank. As well as this, links can be manipulated and placed on websites where the links tag looks innocent but when it is actually clicked it takes you to sites containing, for example adult content.

These along with email spamming happen on a regular basis, as you're probably already too much aware of. Even if you have never posted in a chat room or forum but merely signed up to one, your details are still there, making it possibly for spammers to get hold of them in a way that is known as harvesting. Spammers use chat rooms and forums and 'harvest' email addresses that are posted on the site or that appear as member's username. Due to this it is advised that if you need to give your email address out that you replace characters with words; for example yourname@domain.com should be written as yourname[at]domain[dot]com; this stops the spammers being able to harvest your email address.

An Anti-spam campaign that has recently been running to try and stop spammers altogether is one that involves downloading a screensaver to your PC, which has a statement referring to stopping spam. This screensaver, when idle on your PC, sends a lot of data traffic to website that sell the goods and or services that are mentioned in spam emails. The idea behind this was to get these spam sites running at a 95% capacity and to generate lengthy bandwidth bills for the spammers that are behind the sites.

This screensaver has apparently been downloaded more than 90,000 times and has already caused two big spam sites to go offline. Although this shows that the anti-spam campaign is working there is a chance that by doing this you are setting yourself up for more attacks in return to downloading the screensaver. Many discussion groups have also said that doing this could be a dangerous precedent which might cause vigilantism.

Downloading such a thing could also slow down your Internet connection and there is no guarantee that other sites that have nothing to do with spam won't be targeted. Due to this I would recommend that the best possible way to fight spam is through the use of a decent anti spam software package.

Anti spam software packages will stop spam emails reaching your email account; filtering out emails that are from your contacts and that are also seen as safe emails from genuine people that want to contact you or your business.

As well as protecting your email account from spam messages, an anti spam filter system should also block 100% of viruses that could cause devastating harm to your business, including the loss of data. Outbound as well as inbound virus filters are another key feature to an anti spam system, which protects your company reputation by stopping your company spreading viruses unknowingly.

Anti spam filters/software are essential to the smooth running and operation of businesses, making them a wise investment before the damage of spam takes effect.