Spam Wars: Fighting Email
Spam With Spam Filters
Have you ever wondered how those
odd-ball emails make their way into your inbox? Some contain
absurd titles like:
There was so much sugar in that dessert that it made
my eyes hurt!
Hippolytus as old records have said.
Never been better since I laughed the bank.
Welcome to Spam Wars. There are never ending
battles being waged for your inbox. It is the spammers' quest,
duty and job to get you to click or open their email. But
how in the heck does it get past your spam protection?
Confirmation Required
This is the highest level of protection where an action
or reply is required by the sender. While this is an effective
way to block unwanted emails, you may end up blocking important
automated emails from important sources like your bank or credit
card companies.
Reporting Malicious Spammers
Two very common types of malicious emails are virus attachments
and spam that seeks to steal your financial information.
Virus attachments cannot infect your computer unless you
click or open the attachment. There are many virus protection
software programs that warn you once a virus attachment
has been received. Some popular programs include: Norton,
McAffee and Avast.
Spammers seeking to steal your personal
information or gain access to your financial information
go to great lengths to trick unwary users by creating emails
that look exactly like an official email from a reputable
financial or online company.
Detecting Financial Fraud
If you see an email that looks suspicious there are ways to detect it. Let’s
say you receive an email from Bank of America. The email warns you that someone
has attempted to access your account and your cooperation is needed to prevent
this from happening. The email looks very official and contains their logo
along with a properly formatted hyperlink that looks something like this: bankofamerica.com/account_resolutions.
But once you click this, there is a very different link, which still looks
official. The page still looks like Bank of American but the web address is
linking to another website aka: clickster.com/bankofamerica.com
When you see these emails forward them
to the proper departments of the actual company or organization.
Here are two emails for reporting suspicious emails to Pay
Pal and Bank of America. Forward suspicious emails to abuse@bankofmaerican.com and spoof@paypal.com
Spammers' Weapon Of Choice
The spammers' weapon of choice is surprise. Heck, even I've been fooled once
or twice out of sheer curiosity. The email might come to me titled as ‘Dear
Rick’, Or ‘Rick, please read this’. Spammers or mass email
marketers need to sneak past your spam filters, which are either setup by
your Internet Service Provider (ISP) or your own email client spam filters.
Internet Service Providers can only do
so much. It’s up to you if want more protection. There
are third party providers that specialize in identifying
and blocking spam.
How Spam Is Identified
Here are the primary parameters that define an email:
From Address: legal_billpay@biz.com!
From Domain: billpayers.net
Subject: We pay all your late bill fees today.
Body Text: You have been approved!
Attachments:
Specific file Names: paynow
Specific File Extensions: paynow.exe
Most ISPs have a ongoing file of known
addresses and domains belonging to spammers. However, identifying
spam using the subject line and body text is more difficult
and must be blocked at the user level.
Blocking Spam Based On Use
Since I run a business I do
not want to unwittingly block new emails from potential business
inquiries. So I have to deal with a moderate amount of spam.
Some users work around the problem by creating multiple emails
for friends, family, business and general use. If you have
some techy skills you may define your own spam filters within
specific email domain accounts. You may view or download my
own set of filters for free at the link below.
'Spam-Filtering-Rules'  Download
File Text File
As you receive new spam you may add them to this list to
decrease your spam influx.
Related Articles;
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Your Emails Delivered
About the Author
Rick Vidallon is President of Visionefx, a Web
design company based in Virginia Beach, Va. They provide
services to national companies as well as small to medium
businesses throughout the United States.
Rick can be reached
at (757) 619-6456 or rick@visionefx.net.
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