| Q: What is Spam?
A: Electronic junk mail or junk newsgroup postings. Some people define spam even more generally as any unsolicited e-mail. However, if a long-lost brother finds your e-mail address and sends you a message, this could hardly be called spam, even though it's unsolicited. Real spam is generally e-mail advertising for some product sent to a mailing list or newsgroup.
In addition to wasting people's time with unwanted e-mail, spam also eats up a lot of network bandwidth. Consequently, there are many organizations, as well as individuals, who have taken it upon themselves to fight spam with a variety of techniques. But because the Internet is public, there is really little that can be done to prevent spam, just as it is impossible to prevent junk mail. However, some online services have instituted policies to prevent spammers from spamming their subscribers.
There is some debate about the source of the term, but the generally accepted version is that it comes from the Monty Python song, "Spam spam spam spam, spam spam spam spam, lovely spam, wonderful spam…" Like the song, spam is an endless repetition of worthless text. Another school of thought maintains that it comes from the computer group lab at the University of Southern California who gave it the name because it has many of the same characteristics as the lunchmeat Spam:
- Nobody wants it or ever asks for it.
- No one ever eats it; it is the first item to be pushed to
the side when eating the entree.
- Sometimes it is actually tasty, like 1% of junk mail that
is really useful to some people.
Q: What can be done about it?
A:Use our spam filters: Log in with your username and your password. Full instructions are there. But in brief, there is a whitelist and a blacklist. Any addresses on the whitelist will not be considered as spam, no matter what the content, and will go through to your inbox. Any addresses on the blacklist will be considered as spam, no matter what the content. These messages can either be Marked as spam, or can be Bounced so you don't get them at all.
To go to the page where you can set up the spam filters for your e-mail account, Click here.
Q: How come some legitimate emails are marked as spam, and how come some spam still gets through?
A: Sometimes the spam filters will get a 'false positive', resulting in tagged mails which are not actually spam at all. Since spammers don't usually highlight the fact that their mail is unwanted, unsolicited ads, SpamAssassin has to try to work it out - and it's not always easy to do.
Each e-mail message is NOT read by a human who says: 'well, is this spam or isn't it'? It is not even read by an 'intelligent' machine. No, your e-mail is sent through a filter that scans each e-mail. It looks through the text, and the route the message took to get to your computer (called the headers), and the content of the message and the underlying coding in the case of HTML e-mail. It also checks known blacklists.
The spam filters gives points based on what it found. These points are assigned based on the tricks used by known spammers. For example it checks how many HTML tags there are, if it has hidden text, message tracking images, no 'from' address, contains a toll free number. The full list is at:
SpamAssassin.org/test.html
Feel free to have a look.
Each message is scored based on these rules, and once the score reaches 5 or greater it is considered spam. We can change that threshold of 5 up or down, to in effect allow more spam in or less. Lowest score is 0.0 where all messages are marked as spam. Highest score is 80, but anything past 20 and very few messages are marked as spam.
In the case of any legitimate mailing lists that you are on, they very often meet the criteria to be labelled as spam. For example, being HTML e-mail, toll free numbers, info about how to be removed, and various spam phrases. That is why some legitimate e-mails look like spam, and are labelled as spam.
To help with you either getting legitimate e-mail, or stopping the spam that makes it through the filters, there is a whitelist and a blacklist. Any addresses on the whitelist will not be considered as spam, no matter what the content, and will go through to your inbox. Any addresses on the blacklist will be considered as spam, no matter what the content.
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