Know about Spam

Many of us receive anonymous e-mails in our Inbox. Some of them are filtered by spam busters provided by websites like Google and Yahoo to avoid spams but its not been able to completely eliminate spam mails from loading our mail space. Here is a small note i wrote on spams.....

What is Spam?

Generally, spam means unsolicited and bulk e-mail message. It is unsolicited, because the recipient did not ask for the mail so the sender didn't have verifiable permission to send it. It is bulk, because similar mails are sent to several recipients. To classify a mail as spam, it must be unsolicited and bulked. There are normal bulk mails, for example applications for a job, business solicitations, etc. There are normal unsolicited mails as well, for example newsletters, discussion lists, etc. Only those mails can be classified as spams that are unsolicited and bulk at the same time.

To determine what spam means is a really difficult task so the above-mentioned definition is not a perfect one. The biggest problem is not that the mails are unsolicited or bulk, but the fact that every e-mail not being requested, unsolicited or bulk is more expensive for the recipient than the sender in terms of money and resources.

Based on the above, the following attributes can be said about spam:

• The recipient person is not important because the message has been sent to many users without change.
  
• The recipient didn't allow a verifiable way, prudently and definitely the sending of the mail.
  
• Sending and receiving spam mails result in unequal benefit to the sender.
  

Increasing problem...

Nowadays, besides viruses, spam is the most important question of the Internet. Several solutions have been made against them (regulations, spam filter softwares), but unfortunately there are no techniques, applications that can provide 100% protection at the moment. In spite of this the attack against them is going on, the content filtering applications are on the top of the security software market.

Why is it harmful?

The main damage is the waste of time spent on "handling" spam messages: recognizing, selecting, reading and/or deleting of spam mails. This could be a real problem for example in a workplace.

Moreover the "superfluous" loading of the network or mail servers is also an important question regarding processing and storage capacity.

On the user side, relevant information could be lost among the spam mails arriving in large numbers. Not to mention the deterioration of the e-mail address which becomes unusable because of being loaded by spams.

Recently, as you can see, viruses and unsolicited mail have been intertwined so some spam mail can deliver viruses as well.