As most small, medium and large businesses in this country have seen the SPAM Emails have hurt our productivity and caused excessive costs.

Here are a few very interesting web links on this issue and the FTC report on SPAM to Congress.

http://www.ftc.gov/reports/dneregistry/report.pdf

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/32739.html

http://www.out-law.com/php/page.php?page_i…64552&area=news

It is true that a DO NOT SPAM list is not going to fly, it would simply be used by the SPAMMERS. So then we need a plan of attack. Literally. It was recently estimated that SPAM is costing American Businesses over 54 Billion a year in lost productivity. We need to take out SPAM.

Remember in the movie "Rambo" where Sly went into the Communications tent with a 50 Caliber Machine Gun in his arms and destroyed the communication systems? Well, then how about Navy Seals, Green Barets, Special Forces, SWAT Teams, in black helicopters lower down the ropes and take out the evil do’ers, which are causing this distrust in our systems of communications. A limited war on SPAM taken to those who wish to disrupt all we are and all we have built, we have come to far and sacrificed too much to allow a melt down of our society due to SPAM.

Any civilization to succeed needs proper systems of commmunication, transportation, distribution, education, common currency-unit of trade and that which is needed to sustain life. When any of these are disrupted the whole of that civilization is at risk. We cannot allow this to continue, we need a war on SPAM, similar to the war on drugs. Attack the VR world by attacking those systems used by Spammers in the real world. By attacking these things early on, we send out a message to the Spammers that we mean business. There will be cheering in the streets every time the number of SPAM mail goes down.

It is an act of terrorism to send out SPAM, and SPAM which is coming from outside the country on servers in China, Nigeria, Caribean, or anywhere in the world is a form of International Terrorism and it is no worse than the attacks on our other infrastructures in the US or abroad. No worse than an attack on a pipeline, refinery, water supply, rail tracks, bridges, etc. We need to protect the system. Since no one has a solution that will get rid of SPAM now and immediately, I here by throw out the idea of military special forces in a call to action.

We must defend the system from attack. We must prevent the further melt down and growing distrust in the Virtual World of the Internet, which has and can potentially allow for the the forward progress of mankind into the future period and the next step in our evolutionary process towards a one world peace and unity of the entire species Planet Wide. The Internet is truly one of the greatest gifts of our modern era, we must protect this evolving technology as we would any other infrastructure under attack. This is not funny anymore, this is not a game, the SPAMMERS have raised the stakes and increased SPAM against the will of the people for thier own personal gain, no matter who it hurts. This is unacceptable and they have been alerted, instead of them carefully monitoring themselves and carefully screening email recipients for proper targeting, they blast SPAM the World into an Internet Hell. They have failed to monitor and respect the wishes of all those who have found value in this new communication process which has done so much to unite the World. By Spammers continuing this attack on our country and societies of the World they are bringing the best communication system in the history of mankind to it’s knees. This must be taken care of.

Of course this is my personal opinion as it is the many Americans who are frustrated, running readline against the clock, wallowing in consumer debt, scared about the future and now this complication of SPAM must be stopped. We need to pull out all the stops and stop tip-toe-ing and looking for the laws to help us, it is time for action. We passed the CAN-SPAM act, and the Spammers have instead stuck their middle fingers up and raised the stakes in this bluff game of hide and seek and catch me if you can. Well, we can CAN-SPAM. If we dare to take action. Are we so decadent that we believe that we cannot enforce a law because of another law, even though the whole of our society wants to rid us of this pest we call SPAM, which is actually a federal protected trademark of a food product.

If the FTC admits along with Industry that there is nothing they can do. And the FTC’s conclusion is to let the free market figure it out, which is noble indeed and the rightful conclusion in my opinion, then let’s fix the problem. free enterprise can fix it, but how long? At 54 Billion per year in lost productivity estimated and climbing, we cannot afford to wait any longer, we are at a crisis point. We need this additional bandwidth for miliatry, video cell phones, VoIP and the entertainment industry, for better flash presentation, for better wireless broadband-no digital divide efforts. We need action, no more talk, no more studies, no more games, no more BS.

We now have a 60 page report done by the FTC with references which are all verified, the problem is growing and it is known, it has been found to be an evil attack against the whole of humanity and it must be stopped before it grows worse. If not we will see video ads pop-onto the next generation of cell phones, PDA wireless devices, more disruptins of our daily lives with computer viruses, privacy invasions and identity theft. Folks in my personal opinion, it is time for a literal war on SPAM.

Declare war on SPAM and the American people will reward itself with added productivity, prosperity, renewed sense of purpose.

Declare a war on SPAM and small businesses will reward the free market with more jobs, purchases and efficiencies.

Declare a war on SPAM and the strength and vision of the future of America will be revived by it’s citizens and stakeholders.

Declare a war on SPAM to alert the world that our communication systems are off limits to International Terrorist Attcks.

If we fail to make a stand here and now, the Internet is doomed in the future and we will see more attacks, viruses, abuses until one day it becomes the main target used to exploit us and serve the will of the enemy. Let’s get smart and get busy, action is needed, no more reports-the FTC report says it all. No more committees, no more talk, action, a call to action. It is time to act, we have observed, oriented, decided and now it is time to act. Action is what we need.

We welcome ideas on this subject, we welcome ideas and solutions to end the unecessary SPAM without limiting our right to communicate amongst our selves or lessen our right to Freedom of the Press or Freedom of Speech. Any ideas suggestions or debates are of interest to us. Although a War on SPAM seems harsh, if we fail to act all the studies, meetings, committees of the last 2 years have been wasted and all we see is a 34% increase in that same period for some much higher.

"Lance Winslow" - Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; www.WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs/

The Vandals are coming! And this time they’re after your wallets.

It’s a new form of insidious spam and like its inbred email cousin, it’s staggeringly stupid.

People are vandalizing "Wikis" in an attempt to get free advertising for their business.

First, what’s a wiki?

If you’re not familiar with this little web phenomenon, you should immediately dig in and learn. "Wiki" (pronounced "wee kee") is Hawaiian for "quick." And quick it is. The word is used on the web for a page that *anyone* can edit.

When I first heard of this concept I immediately thought "there is no way it will work - it will be utter chaos" but the mass proliferation of wikis and their clear success have proven me wrong.

The medium lends itself to some amazing ideas. For example, the "wikipedia" project is an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. It’s surprisingly accurate and useful.

Alas, as with all great things on the Internet, there are forces out there ready and willing to muck it up for everyone.

A "wiki vandal" is someone who goes to a wiki and posts erroneous information. Sometimes this is for fun (like posting your boss’s phone number and sexual habits under a wiki entry about "bondage" - hehe), sometimes it’s for damage (like totally erasing an entry just because you are bitter about life), and sometimes it’s for advertising (like editing an entry with links to your bazillion dollar business "op*ortunity").

Luckily, there are people out there watching the wikis who will change erroneous information quickly. However, sometimes the vandalism is hard to catch and it sticks.

Now, if the wiki vandals were smart, they’d create a relevant encyclopedia entry about themselves and link to it from other wiki entries.

Do it relevantly and intelligently enough and it may just stick and bring you some appropriate attention.

But, of course, we’re talking about spammers here, and there is already an encyclopedia entry for "Down’s Syndrome."

Copyright 2004 Val Halla

About The Author

Val Halla researches Internet Marketing Oddities. You can be alerted when she discovers something odd enough and important enough to merit your attention when you visit her site: http://www.webgodessvalhalla.com. She may be reached at: webgoddessvalhalla@yahoo.com

A Privacy Policy can be defined as the policy under which a company or organization operating a web site handles the personal information collected about visitors to the site. For most of us consumers, privacy involves protecting our integrity and our right to disclose or not our personal information to third parties, without letting anybody bother us with unsolicited communications if we do not want to be contacted.

Why has privacy become such a big deal for consumers over the last few years? The answer is that customers need reassurance before giving out their personal information to someone they do not know. They might really like your web site and even visit it often, but as soon as you ask for their name, they get suspicious. Moreover, if you also ask for their address, phone number, credit card number, bank names, account numbers, health history, or current job information, they start worrying about what you are going to do with all that information. Can you blame them? Of course you cannot. What you have to do is ensure you address some basic but critical aspects of their concern, through a clear and efficient Privacy Policy.

Below are some important issues you should take into consideration when writing your company’s Privacy Policy:

1) Explain what types of information you collect and how you use it

Provide reassurance. Clearly explain what types of information you ask from your visitors for and what you are going to do with such information. Besides personal information, what other information do you keep track of? Do you collect information from children? How do you verify parental consent for information about their children? Remember that information is power and although about two thirds of Internet users might be willing to accept a guarantee that you will not abuse their privacy, the other quarter feels extremely nervous about the way their personal information might be used. Therefore, if your web site mines raw transaction data to identify visitors, to come up with new offers, or to sell their names to merchandisers, you will need to explain how you share that information within your own family of companies and outside, or else you will very likely face serious legal problems.

2) Explain why your server and online operations are secure

Now you have already told people what information you ask for and what you do with it, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. Next you will have to explain what makes your server and online operations secure. You probably do not want to be caught with no answer when confronted with questions such as, ‘How do you make sure nobody steals my credit card information?’ or ‘How do you protect the privacy of my emails to your customer support team?’ Point out how your consumers can tell if they are really on a secure server, i.e. the change in the URL, the icons that show up on the status bar, etc. You may even take a shot at explaining encryption, and the Secure Sockets Layer. Most importantly, concentrate on the benefits to the consumer, for in the end, most of them will not care less about all the security measures you take and all the money you spend to make your website secure, unless that translates into some specific benefits to them.

3) Let customers out

When people read your Privacy Policy for the first time, they will want to know how they can start or stop receiving email from you. Giving customers an opt-in and opt-out option is a great way to build trust and lower their personal barriers. However, you must be aware that people’s needs, desires and interests might change over time and despite the fact that no one likes to lose a customer, you must let them go if they state that they are no longer interested in receiving your emails. In order to protect your customers’ privacy, you must give them access to their personal profile or account, and let them delete themselves. Since one of the biggest invasions of privacy is spam, one of the organizations created to fight spam called The Anti SPAM League considers that it is a good idea to allow people to opt into your e-mail newsletter twice - once by clicking the checkbox and Submit button, and again by responding to the e-mail notification that they can subscribe if they reply -. Double opt-in makes it more likely that people know what they are doing when they volunteer for the email. Remember to include an ‘unsubscribe’ option at the bottom of each newsletter you email to your customer base. Of course, if most of your customers request to be removed from your mailing list then you will have a much more serious problem because your business will be in danger. But still, you must always give your customers a way out.

4) Let customers view and edit their personal information

If you give people the opportunity to view and edit their information, chances are they will provide even more. The reasoning under this is pretty basic: almost no one destroys his or her own data. Therefore, whenever you display customers’ personal information, place clear and visible labels indicating how they can edit it. Be clear about how they can view and edit their information, i.e. ‘You can access all your personally identifiable information that we collect online by logging in and clicking the ‘Change User Info’ link in the box on the right-hand side of every page’. Also, answer questions that might be of extreme importance to some customers such as, ‘Can I review information you have about my child?’.

5) Inform customers about policy changes

Most businesses revise their Privacy Policies from time to time. If you are among these businesses, inform your customers how they can have access to those changes and revisions. For example, include a sentence in your Privacy Policy such as, ‘New versions will be posted on this web site, so please check back periodically for updates’.

6) Tell your customers who to contact in case they have questions about privacy

Sometimes people might have some specific questions that are not explicitly covered in your Privacy Policy. For example, where they can learn more about their right to privacy or who they can talk to if they have a question about their privacy. Always include one or more ways in which customers can contact you regarding privacy issues. This contributes a lot in terms of reassurance.

7) Write a privacy policy that people can understand

Last, but not least, this issue can make the whole difference between a trusted business and one that may look OK, but deep inside you feel you cannot trust. Unfortunately, most Privacy Policies are written by lawyers and consequently, contain way too many technicalities. We do not question the value of legal terminology, but we greatly emphasize the fact that a Privacy Policy does not need to sound too serious or elegant. It just needs to be clear and simple, so that any average consumer can understand it without much effort. If you use industry or in-house jargon without explanation you make readers suspect that you are trying to pull the wool over their eyes and the final result debilitates the whole purpose of the policy, which is to build trust. Sure you will have to talk about your security precautions, but refer to them in plain English before you mention tech words that most people do not understand.

Our advice regarding how to write an efficient Privacy Policy can be summed up in just two sentences: ‘Keep it simple’, and ‘Do not lie to your customers’. If you want to learn more about this and other related topics, check out www.Anti-Spam-League.org. This organization offers free membership and the chance to access a wide amount of relevant information on privacy, spam, email abuse, Internet fraud, responsible marketing and several other topics.

About The Author

The purpose of the Anti SPAM League is to help consumers and business owners reduce the amount of SPAM they receive. In addition, our Anti SPAM organization believes that educating site owners in the area of SPAM prevention and ways to successfully and responsibly market their sites, is key in making a difference.

mike@anti-spam-league.org

Effectively stopping spam over the long-term requires much more than blocking individual IP addresses and creating rules based on keywords that spammers typically use. The increasing sophistication of spam tools coupled with the increasing number of spammers in the wild has created a hyper-evolution in the variety and volume of spam. The old ways of blocking the bad guys just don’t work anymore.

Examining spam and spam-blocking technology can illuminate how this evolution is taking place and what can be done to combat spam and reclaim e-mail as the efficient, effective communication tool it was intended to be.

One method used to combat spam is whitelisting. Whitelists are databases of trusted email sources. The list may contain specific email addresses, IP addresses or trusted domains. Emails received from a whitelisted source are allowed to pass through the system to the user’s email box. The list is built when users and email administrators manually add trusted sources to the whitelist. Once built, the catch-rate for spam can be close to 100%, however, whitelists produce an inordinate number of false positives.

It is virtually impossible to produce an exhaustive list of all possible legitimate email senders because legitimate email can come from any number of sources. To get around this difficulty, some organizations have instituted a challenge-response methodology. When an unknown sender sends an email to a user’s account, the system automatically sends a challenge back to the sender. Some challenge-response systems require the sender to read and decipher an image containing letters and numbers. The image is designed to be unreadable by a machine, but easily recognizable by a human. Spammers would not spend the time required to go through a large number of challenge-response emails, so they drop the address and move on to those users who don’t use such a system.

Whitelists are only partially successful and impractical for many users. For example, problems can arise when users register for online newsletters, order products online or register for online services. If the user does not remember to add the new email source to their whitelist, or if the domain or IP address is entered incorrectly, the communication will fail. Additionally, whitelists impose barriers to legitimate email communication and are viewed by some as just plain rude.

Whitelists are not widely used by email users and administrators as a primary tool to fight spam because of the high number of false positives, and the difficulties in creating a comprehensive list of email sources. Because whitelists are not widely used, spammers typically do not develop countermeasures. As with other spam fighting techniques, whitelists are most effective when used in conjunction with other anti-spam tools.

The Solution

When used individually, each anti-spam technique has been systematically overcome by spammers. Grandiose plans to rid the world of spam, such as charging a penny for each e-mail received or forcing servers to solve mathematical problems before delivering e-mail, have been proposed with few results. These schemes are not realistic and would require a large percentage of the population to adopt the same anti-spam method in order to be effective. You can learn more about the fight against spam by visiting our website at www.ciphertrust.com and downloading our whitepapers.

Dr. Paul Judge is a noted scholar and entrepreneur. He is Chief Technology Officer at CipherTrust, the industry’s largest provider of enterprise email security. The company’s flagship product, IronMail provides a best of breed enterprise anti spam solution designed to stop spam, phishing attacks and other email-based threats. Learn more by visiting http://www.ciphertrust.com/products/spam_and_fraud_protection today.

Will other spammers take heed? Don’t count on it.

Jeremy Jaynes was on top of the world. By age 28, he owned a million-dollar home, a high-class restaurant, a chain of gyms and countless other toys. Yet those were only the spoils of his main line of business, which was swindling innocent people out of their money through email scams. From an unassuming house serving as his company’s headquarters in Raleigh, NC, Jaynes sent an estimated ten million messages a day pitching products most recipients didn’t want, amassing an estimated $24 million fortune in the process. Using aliases such as Jeremy James and Gaven Stubberfield, Jaynes spammed his way up to the #8 position on Spamhaus’ Register Of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) and grossed as much as $750,000 a month, allowing him to live like a king.

However, Jaynes ran head-on into an information superhighway road block when a Virginia judge sentenced him to nine years in prison for his November 2004 conviction on felony charges of using false IP addresses to send mass email advertisements (some just call it spamming). The conviction was a landmark decision, as Jaynes became the first person in the United States convicted of felony spam charges. Though his operation was based in North Carolina, Jaynes was tried in Virginia because it is home to a large number of the routers that control much of North America’s Internet traffic (it’s also the home of AOL and a government building or two).

He should’ve Used the Privacy Software

During the trial, prosecutors focused on three of Jaynes’ most egregious scams: software that promised to protect users’ private information; a service for choosing penny stocks to invest in; and a work-from-home "FedEx refund processor" opportunity that promised $75-an-hour work but did little more than give buyers access to a website of delinquent FedEx accounts. Sound familiar? Anyone with an e-mail address has received countless messages originating from Jaynes’ operation. (If you’re still waiting on your privacy software to show up, it’s probably safe to stop checking the mailbox.)

Jaynes got lists of millions of email addresses through a stolen database of America Online customers. He also illegally obtained e-mail addresses of eBay users. While the prosecutors still don’t know how Jaynes got access to the lists, the Associated Press reported that the AOL names matched a list of 92 million addresses that an AOL software engineer has been charged with stealing.

When Jaynes’ operation was raided, investigators found that the house from which he ran his operation was wired with 16 T-1 lines (a large office building can get by on a single T-1 line for all its users). Investigators also entered into evidence to-do lists handwritten by Jaynes. Take a look at Jeremy Jayne’s meticulously detailed lists at:

* www.ciphertrust.com/images/jaynes_notes1.JPG
* www.ciphertrust.com/images/jaynes_notes2.JPG
* www.ciphertrust.com/images/jaynes_notes3.JPG

Good Work if You Can Get (Away With) It

The economics of spamming makes Jaynes’ decision to build a career of it understandable, though not noble. Spammers work on the law of averages, which would seem like an odd strategy considering that the average response rate for a spam message is just one-tenth of one percent. However, once you do the math even this miniscule response rate can make one very wealthy very quickly. If a spammer sends one million messages pushing a product width a $40 profit, a response rate of 0.1 percent works out to 1000 customers, or $40,000 per million messages sent. Since each message costs only fractions of a penny to send, and Jaynes was sending literally billions of messages a year, it’s easy to see how he pulled in $400,000 to $750,000 a month, while spending perhaps $50,000 on bandwidth and other overhead.

The fact that spamming can be such a profitable undertaking means that the profession is not likely to go anywhere in the near future. Spammers have financial motivation to come up with innovative ways to avoid detection, and they have begun to join forces. While the landmark decision handed down in the Jaynes trial may serve as a deterrent to some would-be spammers, it is unlikely that the threat of prosecution will keep future spammers from refining their trade. For now and the foreseeable future, the answer still lies in technology, not law enforcement.

Dr. Paul Judge is a noted scholar and entrepreneur. He is Chief Technology Officer at CipherTrust, the industry’s largest provider of enterprise email security. The company’s flagship product, IronMail provides a best of breed enterprise anti spam solution designed to stop spam, phishing attacks and other email-based threats. Learn more by visiting http://www.ciphertrust.com/products/spam_and_fraud_protection/ today.

No doubt about it.

"Spam" (unsolicited commercial email) threatens to paralyze and ultimately destroy the email system as it currently exists on the Internet.

Anyone with an email address can attest to the fact that the avalanche of Spam has only increased in the last year and shows no sign of stopping.

However, the current system many Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) use to deal with Spam may just destroy the Internet’s email system long before the spammers do.

Now, I won’t deny that the weight of the Spam on any ISP’s resources can rate very significant.

It’s been estimated that between 30-60% of all email now sent is Spam!

This means that 30-60% an ISP’s system resources (bandwidth, hardware, system maintenance) go towards delivering messages nobody wants to receive.

Out of self-defense, many ISP’s turn to third party services like SpamCop, SPEWS (Spam Prevention Early Warning System), and SpamHaus to help them identify sources of spam and block the messages before their email systems get clogged.

No Trial - No Defense - Guilty!

In theory, it’s a great system.

In practice, it creates a situation resembling a witch hunt where the accused gets burned at the stake without a trial, let alone the ability to face their accuser. Here’s how the system works.

Let’s say a business habitually sends legitimate email to its customers or prospects who asked to receive the email.

As long as nobody complains, life proceeds as normal.

But then let’s say one of those people forgets they opted in to the business’s email list and reports an email message as spam to one of the services I mentioned above.

Result: the business gets blacklisted by one or more of these services and ISP’s in turn automatically block email (legitimate email) sent by the business to its customers and opt-in subscribers.

To make matters even worse, nobody at these anti-spam services bothers to let the business know they’ve been blacklisted.

When the business finally discovers their status and tries to contact SpamCop, SPEWS or SpamHaus, the real fun begins.

If the business does discover which service(s) blacklisted them, they’ll find they can’t call anyone on the phone to discuss the problem.

They also discover these services are totally unregulated and there is no higher court of appeals.

Any email responses from these services often contain a smug attitude of assumed guilt that scoffs at your claims of innocence.

Also, don’t bother asking for the opportunity to face your accuser in order to prove your innocence because they get to hide behind a cloak of anonymity.

Combining this attitude of assumed guilt with the inability to prove your innocence creates a recipe for disaster for every legitimate business.

Oh, by the way, while writing this article, I received 19 spam email messages through an ISP monitored by all 3 anti-spam services.

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

In the end, the current system only creates opportunity for abuse that targets legitimate businesses while the real spammers just merrily keep sending their flood of email.

(c) Jim Edwards - All Rights reserved - http://www.thenetreporter.com

Jim Edwards is a syndicated newspaper columnist and the co-author of an amazing new ebook that will teach you how to use free articles to quickly drive thousands of targeted visitors to your website or affiliate links…

Simple "Traffic Machine" brings Thousands of NEW visitors to your website for weeks, even months… without spending a dime on advertising! Turn Words Into Traffic

Effectively stopping spam over the long-term requires much more than blocking individual IP addresses and creating rules based on keywords that spammers typically use. The increasing sophistication of spam tools coupled with the increasing number of spammers in the wild has created a hyper-evolution in the variety and volume of spam. The old ways of blocking the bad guys just don’t work anymore.

Examining spam and spam-blocking technology can illuminate how this evolution is taking place and what can be done to combat spam and reclaim e-mail as the efficient, effective communication tool it was intended to be.

Heuristics (Rule-based Filtering)

One method used to combat spam is Rule-based, or Heuristic Filtering. Rule-based filters scan email content for predetermined words or phrases that may indicate a message is spam. For example, if an email administrator includes the word "sex" on a company’s rule-based list, any email containing this word will be filtered.

The major drawback of this approach is the difficulty in identifying keywords that are consistently indicative of spam. While spammers may frequently use the words “sex” and ‘Viagra” in spam emails, these words are also used in legitimate business correspondence, particularly in the healthcare industry. Additionally, spammers have learned to obfuscate suspect words by using spellings such as "S*E*X", or "VI a a GRR A".

It is impossible to develop dictionaries that identify every possible misspelling of "spammy" keywords. Additionally, because filtering for certain keywords produces large numbers of false positives, many organizations have found they cannot afford to rely solely on rule-based filters to identify spam.

Signature-Based Spam Filters

Another method used to combat spam is Signature-based Filtering. Signature-based filters examine the contents of known spam, usually derived from honey pots, or dummy email addresses set up specifically to collect spam. Once a honey pot receives a spam message, the content is examined and given a unique identifier. The unique identifier is obtained by assigning a value to each character in the email. Once all characters have been assigned a value, the values are totaled, creating the spam’s signature. The signature is added to a signature database and sent as a regular update to the email service’s subscribers. The signature is compared to every email coming in to the network and all matching messages are discarded as spam.

The benefit of signature-based filters is that they rarely produce false-positives, or legitimate email incorrectly identified as spam. The drawback of signature-based filters is that they are very easy to defeat. Because they are backward-looking, they only deal with spam that has already been sent. By the time the honey pot receives a spam message, the system assigns a signature, and the update is sent and installed on the subscribers’ network, the spammer has already sent millions of emails. A slight modification of the email message will render the existing signature useless.

Furthermore, spammers can easily evade signature-based filters by using special email software that adds random strings of content to the subject line and body of the email. Because the variable content alters the signature of each email sent by the spammer, signature-based spam filters are unable to match the email to known pieces of spam.

Developers of signature-based spam filters have learned to identify the tell-tale signs of automated random character generation. But as is often the case, spammers remain a step ahead and have developed more sophisticated methods for inserting random content. As a result, most spam continues to fool signature-based filters.

The Solution

When used individually, each anti-spam technique has been systematically overcome by spammers. Grandiose plans to rid the world of spam, such as charging a penny for each e-mail received or forcing servers to solve mathematical problems before delivering e-mail, have been proposed with few results. These schemes are not realistic and would require a large percentage of the population to adopt the same anti-spam method in order to be effective. You can learn more about the fight against spam by visiting our website at www.ciphertrust.com and downloading our whitepapers.

Dr. Paul Judge is a noted scholar and entrepreneur. He is Chief Technology Officer at CipherTrust, the industry’s largest provider of enterprise email security. The company’s flagship product, IronMail provides a best of breed enterprise anti spam solution designed to stop spam, phishing attacks and other email-based threats. Learn more by visiting http://www.ciphertrust.com/products/spam_and_fraud_protection today.

I’m sure you find spam just as frustrating and annoying as I do. So I’ve done some investigation in how to report it to get these people hopefully in a bit of strife! And put spam to an end or at least lessen it

You see, I actually didn’t realize for a while I was actually making the situation worse. You ever receive those spam emails where you KNOW for sure you NEVER signed up to receive their emails and then they provide an unsubscribe link down the bottom?

Anyways, here I was clicking the unsubscribe button on all these annoying spam emails thinking I was getting my email address removed from their database where all I was doing was confirming that my email address was active and I was reading their spam emails.

Here is how YOU can report these spammers (and hopefully lessen the amount that drifts in and out of our inbox’s every day).

Report Spam Here:

http://www.spamcop.net/

It will show you how to get the details and IP addresses of the spammers to forward to SpamCop in order to file your report against them. Please make sure before doing this, that the email you report as spam “really” is spam and not something you joined on to receive. It’s just as bad to falsely accuse someone of spam just as it is to receive spam!

Make sure before you join anyone’s mailing list that they have a privacy notice that allows you to unsubscribe at anytime you wish. And states clearly they will not rent nor share your email address with any third party.

If you find this information helpful please feel free to forward it on to your friends. They can join my mailing list simply by sending a blank Email to scams@aweber.com

Join my mailing list simply by sending a blank email to scams@aweber.com (And yes you can unsubscribe at anytime and I will not rent nor share your email address with any third party, spam annoys me just as much as it annoys you)

How would you feel if you found a link on the web that was interesting to you but when you click the link it takes you to a page that is total rubbish? You are not only disappointed but it also wastes your time. Unfortunately, this is often true in many cases. To get a good ranking, often web page designers use "spamdexing". Spamdexing search engines is the practice of deliberately and dishonestly modifying HTML pages to artificially increase the chance of them ranking close to the top of search engine results. This spamming could result in your site getting banned from search engine indices.

To avoid getting banned by search engines make it sure that when a search engine sends spiders to your site it doesn’t find any spamming technique in use.

Hidden or Invisible Links:

One reason why you could be banned by a search engine, is when you are creating multiple sites on the same or similar topic and linking them all together through invisible links. But you really need to have unique content on each and every site and not link them all together where it really doesn’t make sense to do so. If you are interested in learning more about spamming then you should read this article: Missing Backlinks in Google - High Rankings Advisor.

Keyword Stuffing:

Most modern search engines have the ability to determine overuse of a word to increase the keyword frequency on a page. They also have the ability to analyze a page for keyword stuffing, and determine whether the frequency is above a normal level. So, while designing your site, remember not to stuff keywords or else you run the risk of getting banned.

Meta tag Stuffing:

Do not repeat keywords in the meta tags more than once, and do not use keywords that are unrelated to the site’s content. If it isn’t represented in the text content, it shouldn’t be in the meta tags.

Hidden Text:

Putting text (usually keywords) where visitors will not see them, in order toincrease a page’s keyword relevancy. This is commonly done by making some text the same as the background color of the page.

Cloaking:

Cloaking is a very borderline method, in which visitors and search engines receive different versions of a page, and should be considered very carefully.

Link spamming:

Google page ranking algorithm gives a higher ranking to a website the more other websites link to it. Some spammers may create multiple web sites at different domain names that all link to each other.

Spamming refers to practices or techniques that are dishonest. To optimize your ranking, do not use any technique that will encourage search engines to ban you. Instead you should emphasize on how to optimize for your visitors. So remember the tips regarding spamming when you are designing your web site, and avoid getting banned by the search engines.

References:

http://www.webopedia.com
http://www.highrankings.com
http://en.wikipedia.org

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Until recently, spam has been an annoyance, a definite load on your email system and network, a waste of productive time and money, but we are about to find that the cost could get much higher.

Spam blockers are now becoming a necessity rather than an optional email utility, the reason is that spam is becoming much more dangerous.

Now, just like you, I looked into spam blocker software mainly because I didn’t like being constantly bombarded with various anatomy enhancing messages or ironically, advertisements for spam blocker software itself.

A skeptical person may even wonder if this whole problem is not rooted in the business model of lesser than honest spam blocker software companies - but that’s another article.

Whatever the root cause, one fact is true, the spam problem is turning into a far more costly and dangerous issue that could effect you in profound ways.

The dangers are becoming so serious that we finally got serious about reviewing spam blocker software - the result you can find here: http://www.blockmorespam.com/spam_blocker_software.html

The evolution of spammers into 3 new and very dangerous areas had me scambling to get serious about finding spam blocker software and techniques that are more effective than what I’ve been using in the past.

The 3 new dangers that threaten you are:

1. Rise in hijacked and spoofed email addresses means that someone can make it look like their spamming campaign is coming from your computer. The impact is that you could have your internet connection terminated or put on hold by your ISP - all without your knowledge. This raises the issue that spam needs to be blocked, ideally, in both directions - to ensure you are not an unwilling accomplice to a malicious spam campaign

2. Convergence of viruses and spam. You are no doubt aware of the nasty rise in viruses that end up impacting your PC in a number of harmful ways including slowing you system down, crashing your system, logging your keystrokes, stealing private information, redirecting you to porn sites, etc… Now, in the past the incidence of a virus travelling through email would be fairly predictable. That has changed with viruses working together with spam. An example is the SoBig virus whos purpose was to create a broad spamming infrastructure by planting code on unwilling participants PCs creating a mass threat to email security. This is just the tip of the iceburg, spam will increasingly be used to spread and activate very dangerous viruses - for this reason alone, you need to be looking at spam blocker software.

3. Mix of spam and phishing. If you haven’t heard of phishing before, it refers to the misleading emails you get dressing themselves up to look like legitimate emails to get confidential, often financial, information from you. Some common examples are the Paypal or Bank emails that claim you need to login with your private information to verify contact information or update account information. In reality, this is a malicious third party that steals your private information and can cause you MAJOR identity and financial problems.

So what can we do about this?

It’s time to get serious about spam blocker software - as a first line of defense. Regulation isn’t working, while it is getting tougher and tougher to quickly decide what is spam and what is not in your inbox and as we have seen, the stakes are getting higher.

There are hundreds of shareware, freeware and otherware solutions on the market, the time for experimentation is over. In my trials of over 12 different spam blocker solutions, we found incredible variance in the reliabiltiy, effectiveness leading to our finding that there were only a small handful of serious spam blocker solutions. For our findings, feel free to visit our review page over at: http://www.blockmorespam.com/spam_blocker_software.html

Discover More About Stopping Dangerous Spam With Reviews, Spam Blocker Software, Anti-Spam Measures and More, Visit our Leading Resouce Site Here: http://www.blockmorespam.com