| How Spam Works Posted By : Matt Garrett -
Spam involves sending unsolicited e-mail to many people, and is a very common practice today. It is not unusual for the average person to have 30% of his or her e-mail as spam, and there is a huge demand for new techniques to block spam including the existing methods, such as spam blockers, spam filters and the creation of e-mail whitelists. The most unfortunate aspect of how spam works is that it is quite simple. A spammer needs only collect a large number of web addresse.. .
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Spammers consistently change tactics to try and stay ahead of the curve, and the latest is image-based spam. Because spam blockers have become so efficient at detecting text-based spam, no matter how many different ways they try to spell "mortgage" and "Viagra," the spammers have added a new weapon to their arsenal: the graphic file. By spamming people with a small .jpeg or .gif file with the embedded text, spam blockers usually let the letter go through. The problem is these image-based spam letters are considerably larger in size than text-based spam, which wreaks havoc on the e-mail servers, and they take longer to process. "This is the huge size increase in the size of spam. Even a small increase in image spam means a huge increase in the file size of spam being sent around," Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer for antivirus vendor F-Prot, told internetnews.com.
How to be efficient with your e-mail
Mike Song, a co-author of The Hamster Revolution: How to Manage Your E-Mail Before It Manages You, says his research shows that many office workers are spending up to 2½ hours a day handling e-mail. A founding partner of Cohesive Knowledge Solutions, Song is an e-mail efficiency consultant. He and his partners find that most workers don't know how to screen and manage e-mail, particularly if they receive hundreds of messages a day. Companies should have good firewalls and spam blockers to keep out irrelevant stuff. But many in-boxes will overflow anyway. Song suggests using e-mail folders to sort messages. "If you belong to an association that sends e-mailed newsletters, create a folder for that association and send the newsletter immediately to that folder to read later," Song said, "You don't have to read everything when it comes in." Such a system requires paying attention to the subject line — assuming it's informative.
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