Spam: The Things you should know
By: Mel Maseko
On controlling spam, an anti-spam firewall application will, to an extent, help in keeping viruses at bay. There is, however, no firewall that is 100% hacker proof - there are too many ways in which viruses can be embedded in a software download or regular data, for a firewall to detect and catch them all. However there are some relatively effective firewall programs available on the market, and some of them are actually free for your personal use.
At the bare minimum a home personal computer that is connected to a cable modem or a full time connection needs to have and run a personal firewall software program, as well as anti-spyware and some type of anti-viral program.
Spammers harm
In the early days of the Internet, spam was little more than an irritating nuisance. However, like every other aspect of the Internet, spam has evolved to become something far more nefarious in nature.
A insidious tactic that the spammers employ is called "Phishing." It involves the spammer sending out junk email that is specifically designed to look like it is from a reputable, legitimate source such as a reputable company like ebay or paypal. This spam utilizes the company's logo and official graphics.
A 2006 study by Consumer Reports estimated that in two years, Americans spent more than $7 billion on repairs and parts replacement resulting from viruses, malware and spyware. This does not take into account the cost to the Internet Providers who have to pay for all the bandwidth taken up by the spammers junk, or the cost in time, money and productivity to businesses that have to sort through all the spam.
Whitelists - The ultimate in spam protection
A whitelist is a database of trusted email addresses, IP addresses and domains. To build the list, each one of these trusted sources is manually added to the whitelist. Only email from a whitelisted source is delivered to the user's inbox. In fact, whitelists are so effective, that the catch-rate for spam is almost 100%.
The advantage of this method is that it is not worth it to spammers to wade through all the challenge-response emails and respond to them. They are more likely to remove the email address from their lists and go after other addresses that do not have such requirements. However, the inconvenience of having to register to send email to the whitelist user may discourage legitimate email senders from following through.
Article Source: http://www.ezarticles.info
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