Green Eggs And Spam
Do you like Spam? Do you know anybody (besides spammers) who likes Spam? Didn’t think so. Then why is it that our email is perpetually jammed with messages about drugs that will make us younger, slimmer, sexier, smarter along with financial advice guaranteed to end our credit woes, lower our mortgage payments, boost our bank accounts and make us instant stock market experts? Or how about the ones from prince so and so from some country you never heard of who will (for a not-so-small donation) cheerfully turn your hundreds into millions.
Spam, also known as unsolicited bulk email, has gotten out of hand across the Internet. Ferris Research estimated that the cost of Spam to the United States economy is more than $10 billion per year. That takes into account the consumption of computing resources, help desk personnel time, and worker productivity (after all, the few seconds spent deleting each of those emails adds up). When Intermedia.NET launched its new SpamStopper service, it cited 2006 research which estimated that Spam "represents over 66% of all email sent, and more than 10% of lost productivity."
So, as a web site owner, how do you protect your visitors from becoming victims of Spam? The first thing you should do is talk to your web hosting service. All of the top-notch companies offer cutting edge Spam blocking services to help protect you and your customers.
One of the most basic Spam-busting techniques is a simple “black list” function that can prevent future Spam emails from arriving at the same address. This type of filter is not very effective because you don’t usually see unsophisticated email arriving at the same address several times. This technique is used primarily to avoid email from other (real) people that you don’t want to hear from anymore.
Keyword filters are sometimes used to check for instances of a certain string of characters and bar the message if that string of characters is found. The problem with this technique as that the filters can be “over zealous” and actually block email that you want or need to receive. Some filters try to override this problem with by using “regular expressions” (syntax rules used to identify certain strings of text or numbers). This function can be set up to identify text patterns that are commonly used in Spam. Some filters that use regular expressions come with a basic set that can be tailored by the user.
Many web hosts offer Bayesian filters to help protect their customers from Spam. These filters take a large data set and determine the probability that a message is Spam based on its similarity to previous Spam messages. A hosting company that offers this service takes Spam and virus filtering for their customers very seriously.
Every website owner should be proactive in the battle against Spam since there is no automated program that is 100 percent effective against all Spam. Even if there were, spammers (and especially phishers) are clever. As fast as anyone comes up with ways to filter Spam, they come up with ways to get around the filters.
There are a few steps you can take:
- Do not put your personal email address on your website. Instead, use a form so that your email address is hidden.
- Never buy anything sent through a Spam mail. This just encourages them to send more Spam and confirms that your email address is accurate so that they can sell your email address to someone else.
- Never reply to illegitimate Spam and ask to be unsubscribed. They’ll just ignore it anyway, and it tells them that your email address is accurate, which just keeps you on the list. (This does not apply to legitimate email newsletters and mailing lists. Many of them use automated unsubscribe lists at the bottom of their emails and you can use this to get off of mailing lists.)
- Check to make sure that your web hosting company has anti-spam technology.
Referrer Spam
If you own a web site or a blog, you are probably all too familiar with the term “referrer spam.” When you click a hyperlink on one web site, your browser passes to the next site the address of the page where you clicked the link. This is logged by the server hosting the next site. The referrer information can be faked very easily. Some unscrupulous web site owners will arrange to have several computers access a particular web site with a referrer that lists their own web site address.
Less-than-ethical website owners will spam log files in order to have their web sites listed on referrer links. This creates an artificial boost in that’s site’s popularity among the search engines that measure the number of links to the site. It also generates traffic when curious visitors of a victim site click the links displayed in the referrer listing.
Simply put, these people are running advertisements on your web site and using it to boost their search engine rankings. They do this without your knowledge, without your permission and without compensating you in any way for the use of your network. Spammers decide which sites to spam by checking sites automatically such as weblogs.com and popdex.com for sites that have been updated recently. They may also do a simple web search for the phrase “recent referrers.” Once the spammer has chosen which sites to spam, there are many ways to go about it. At one time there was a company that offered to spam the logs of over 55,000 sites for a fee.
Federal anti-spam laws have done little to stop the problem. As Scott Chasin, chief technology officer for anti-spam company MX Logic notes, "Predictions of the impending death of Spam are premature. While significant advances in anti-spam technology have made it possible to relieve many email users of unwanted commercial email before it hits their in boxes, Spam still makes up the majority of all email traffic -- imposing a significant burden on the Internet and on the effectiveness of email."
Copyright 2006 © Website Source, Inc.
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