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The Major Points on Spam
By: Marco Maseko
Spam has become an ever-increasing problem in recent years, costing legitimate businesses a great deal in both time and money.
The legislation (CAN-SPAM) covers "transactional or relationship messages," meaning those emails which help a web site to deal with any transaction, even those which are agreed on, or make updates to any customer whether new or exisiting. None of these may contain false or spoofed routing information.
A major provision of the law - It bans any attempt to falsify the information in the header or subject line. These must correctly identify what the message is about, and accurately display routing information as well as "To" and "from" information. The email must accurately indicate the identity of the sender and recipient. It must accurately portray the domain from which the email originates as well as the senders real email address.
Keep yourself protected from inbox spam
Friend or Foe? Just because an email has been sent to you by a friend, do not assume that it safe for you to open any attachment that comes with it. Contact your friend and verify that they did indeed send it. Very often, spammers will attach a virus to their spam, which, if opened, will hijack your email program and mail itself out to every email address in your address book. This fraudulent email will appear to the recipients to have been sent by you. If they in turn, open this email attachment, the same malicious cycle is repeated.
Chain letters. The spam email directs you to send a small amount of money to each of 4 or 5 names on a list, add your name to the top of the list and remove the last name on it, and then forward the updated list via bulk mail. Typically, the letter will claim the scheme is legal, and may refer to sections of US law as supporting proof of this. Not true. These chain letters are almost always illegal, and nearly all those who participate in them lose their money.
How to Report Spam Abuse
Saving and sending the entire email header is an important step in reporting spam. The header of every email you receive will contain information on the full chain of computers through which the email passed in order to get to you. Generally, most email will pass through at least four computers: The spammer's computer, the spammer's ISP, your ISP and finally your computer. This is the most reliable way for an anti-spam service to track down the spammer's ISP because the spammer will camouflage the "from" address.
As the email passes through each computer, information is added to the header indicating who the mail came from, as well as where they are sending it. While this header information will seem complicated, you just need to make note of the originating ISP, which will be easy to recognize. For example, if you receive your mail through AOL and you note "yahoo" in the string of information, then you will know to report the spam to yahoo.
You can report to www.spamabuse.org. This is a third party reporting agency.
Article Source: http://www.ezarticles.info
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