How To Stop SPAM in Era of Social Networks

The rise of sites like Facebook and MySpace has brought surprising challenges for those who want to share their personal information with friends and colleagues. While these sites take great pains to make sure their users are all real humans, it is perhaps unsurprising that spammers have found ways to harness these sites and cause problems for unsuspecting users.

In the past five years, the amount of email spam worldwide has increased by nearly five times. During the same time span, in spite of efforts to enact strong do-not-call list legislation in most countries, those same spammers are harvesting users' private information in order to make phone calls -- frequently to cellphones -- advertising unwanted products and services.

Many services exist to identify and block email spam. Bad emails are increasingly hard to identify because spammers have improved techniques aimed at bypassing filters. Still, collaborative filtering, where users across the Internet identify which emails are spam, is an effective tool for removing spam from most people's inboxes. So, the impact of harvesting personal details from social-networking sites is much less pronounced that it otherwise would be for email.

A different situation exists for those with cellphones and landlines which might receive unsolicited telemarketer phone calls. These calls are almost never invited, and in many cases the recipient has registered with the appropriate do-not-call list to prevent such a call from even coming in.

While many social networks do not allow users to provide phone numbers, with the rise of mobile-phone usage for social networking via SMS, such services are becoming more common. Alongside them, spam text messages and actual phone calls have doubled in frequency in the past five years.

Luckily, there exist services like collaborative email spam filters for telephone spammers. By sharing information based on what the caller said, and the actual phone number the person called from, online users are fighting back to block these calls. One of the most successful of such sites is Telemarketer Catcher, a free social network where users can exchange their experiences with solicitors and spam callers.

Dean Vesuvio writes on telephony-related topics, with specific emphasis on conference calling and telemarketing. He recently discovered the new area of phone-solicitor blocking, and TelemarketerCatcher.com in particular.

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Ezine : Dean Vesuvio

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8 Easy Ways To Stop Spam

Create and use a temporary email address.

Yahoo and Hotmail provide this feature in order to keep your private email address strictly for your friends and family members and only. The secondary address, you can use for your subscriptions and other purposes. If your secondary address is abused from spammers and your inbox is filled with spam messages, then you can delete it and create another secondary email address.

Use the Spam arrest service.

When you signup for Spam Arrest, you will receive a spamarrest.com email address. You can also protect your existing email accounts by forwarding them to your Spam Arrest email address, or by having Spam Arrest periodically poll them. In that way over 90% of your spam messages will be filtered.

Use your e-mail’s filters.

Almost all email applications have this feature. You can create filters blocking spam words like “make money, opportunities, Viagra, e.t.c” .Doing that, you will block many of your spam messages but not all of them.

NEVER post your email.

Don’t post your email on forums, websites, message boards, guest books and other online places. You should also avoid posting your contact email address on your website. Spammers use software robots and extract email addresses from thousands of websites. If you want to display your email at your website change it to jpeg photo with Photoshop or other image design software.

The use of email blocking tools.

Yahoo for instance has this excellent tool which can block up to 500 email addresses (the Free option, the paid one provide more) and this amount of spam emails will never reach your mailbox. Other web mail services provide similar features too.

The preinstalled filter in your email application.

If you use outlook express you can click “message” (from windows 98 versions and later) and then click “Block sender”. Just doing that you will block many of your unsolicited emails.

Do Not respond to spam at all costs.

When you receive a spam message which asks you to click a link for whatever reason (fake unsubscribe and other) do not click it. If you do that, the spammers will now instantly that they deal with a real email address.

Do Not Ever open unknown messages with attachments.

This is critical. Most of the times the attachment will be a virus (especially if it’s exe or zip format) If you open it you will activate the virus it contains and harm your computer. Accept email attachments ONLY from well known resources such as friends, business colleagues e.t.c. You should also have installed an antivirus which scans your emails before they are saved into your hard drive.

Excellent tools and resources to fight spam are these below:
http://www.mailwasher.net
http://www.sunbelt-software.com/products.cfm

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Source : Isnare : Christos Varsamis

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What is Trackback Spam

Trackback facilitates communication between blogs. When a blogger writes a new entry whether to comment on or refer to an entry found at another blog, the commenting blogger can notify the other blog with a Trackback ping. The receiving blog will display summaries and links to all the commenting entries below the original entry. Trackback spam is when Trackback pings to a site that directs viewers to a totally unrelated URL.

Trackback Explained

Trackback as initially released is an open specification both as a protocol and as a feature of Movable Type 2.2. This contained the first implementation of Trackback. It has always been planned as an open system or a system that could easily be implemented in other blogging tools. This is because of the fact that the real value of Trackback can only be realized when many sites support it.

Basically, Trackback is designed to provide a method of notification between websites. This is a way of one person saying to another that “This is something you may be interested in”. This can be done when a person sends a Trackback ping to the other.

Trackback is a form of remote comments where one person who wishes to comment on a post in another person’s blog writes a post on his own weblog rather than posting the comment directly on the other person’s weblog. The person commenting simply sends a Trackback ping to notify the other. Of course, this is only possible when both blogging tools support the Trackback protocol.

Trackback is likewise a form of content aggregation. When a person writes a post on a topic that a group of people are interested in, he/she sends a Trackback ping to a central server whereby all visitors can read all posts about the topic. Anyone interested in reading about a specific topic could look at the site to continue being updated on what bloggers have to say about it.

Blogging software that supports the Trackback protocol displays a “Trackback URL” along with every entry. This URL is used by the commenting blogger to send XML-formatted information about the new entry to this URL through his/her software. There are some blogging tools that are able to discover this Trackback URL automatically while others require the manual entry by the commenting blogger.

The protocol of Trackback is based on the principle of initiating the connection when sharing of information is desired rather than waiting for this same information to be discovered by other websites. Sites can communicate about related resources and are able to accomplish the automatic listing of all sites that have referenced a particular post. The ping also provides a firm, explicit link between entries as opposed to an implicit link that depends upon outside action.

Trackback is particularly useful in finding out whether other people are thinking well enough about what a person has written on a weblog to actually link to it. However, allowing Trackback links will require more site maintenance to remove Trackback links that are no longer valid. The capability of listing anyone who has placed a link to a site on one’s blog can be abused by spammers.

Trackback Spam

The flood of Trackback initiated by spammers can put a strain on server resources. The amount of Trackback spam that a site is getting may be seen by clicking on “Trackbacks” from the main blog menu and select “Junk Trackbacks”. The repeated pinging of one’s server even at hundreds of times an hour by spammers can cause server CPU overloads and crashes and can result to having the web host shut down the affected account.

There are some defensive measures that can be taken, one is to moderate all Trackbacks. The MT 3.2 allows for approval of all Trackbacks before being posted to a site. Closely related to this is the limiting of unnecessary Trackback usage. Trackbacks are pointless when no one tracks a site back. Not everything needs to be “Trackbackable” so prudence in determining the difference is required. This move is all about giving the spammers less opportunities to play at one’s expense.

The use of the powerful anti-spam Movable Type Plugin called Spam Lookup is another option. Being hit by a flood of Trackback spams can be stopped by looking for the common unwanted words or specific strings to block. Spam Lookup uses PERL Regular Expressions thus by adding a few characters to the keywords; more flexibility in what is being blocked is attained.

Spam Lookup can be configured at the blog or installation level. Configuring at the installation level is suitable for those who have just one blog or want any setting to apply across all the blogs on one’s installation of Movable Type. When settings are intended only to apply to one blog, one can configure Spam Lookup using the Plugins Tab of the Settings Item on the weblog menu.

The plugin has three options in its anti-spam arsenal. It looks up the source IP address of the comment or Trackback and compares it with several centralized blacklist servers. There is an option to force moderation of the comment and adjust its junk status when the IP address is found on the blacklist server. It also looks up the domain names of the posted links. The plugin is likewise able to compare the IP of the source URL of the Trackback with the IP it was sent from. The blog software sending the ping is usually on the same server as the blog itself. Most spams are sent from zombie machines and not from the website thus this sort of spam can be detected.

Link settings are also looked into. A comment that has no links is unlikely to be spam as blog spams generally aim to link to a dodgy site to improve its rankings in search engines. Any comment or Trackback that has more than a certain number of links shall be forcibly moderated.

The keyword filter setting act upon keywords in comments and will replicate some functionality of MT-Blacklist. This is an incredibly powerful feature except that the plugin, by default hardly has any keywords in it. The WordPress Wiki is a good place to find a list that can be pasted in.

The Trackback validator plugin for WordPress performs a simple but very effective test on all Trackbacks in order to stop spam. The plugin retrieves the web page located at the URL included in the Trackback when one is received. The Trackback is approved when the page contains a link to one’s weblog. If the page does not link, the Trackback is flagged as spam and rejected. Since Trackback spammers do not set up custom web pages linking to the weblogs they attack, this test would quickly reveal illegitimate Trackbacks.

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How to block spam for aol users

There is nothing more frustrating than opening up your emails to find dozens of unsolicited emails touting miracle cures, ways to get out of debt, or how to claim your million dollars. Instead of reading the emails that are important to you, you are forced to wade through your virtual junk mail.

America Online Version 9.0 has wonderful tools built into their software

to help manage this flow of junk emails known as spam.

Reporting Spam

An easy feature of AOL is their Report Spam button. Once you open your email, look towards the bottom of the window. If you know that an email is unwanted and unsolicited, and don’t want to risk infection to your computer by opening it, highlight the email by clicking on it once, and click on “Report Spam.” AOL then receives a message about this sender and the sender’s domain.

Also, America Online has a zero tolerance program for fraudulent emails. If you receive an email from someone claiming to be from AOL, asking you to update your billing, confirm your bank account number, give your password, etc., check it out with AOL before you respond. AOL 9.0 has alive chat feature that can be accessed by searching for Keyword Billing.

Setting Spam Controls

AOL 9.0 gives users the ability to filter their email messages. Take a look at the many spam emails you’ve received and make a list of words that seem to be a common denominator. Some examples include “credit,” “debt,” “enhancement,” “herbal,” “free,” “girls,” “sale,” etc. The next step is to decide what words, whether in the title or the body of the message, that you find offense. Add these words to your list, and get ready to take control!

1) Click on Spam Control at the bottom of your email window. Or, enter Keyword Spam.

2) Mail and Spam Control Window will open.

3) Select the screen name for which you are setting the filter. This is a powerful parental control tool, as well, if you are setting the filter for a young user.

4) The first column is Control Who I Get Mail From. You can select to:

Allow mail from all senders.

Allow mail from only AOL members

Allow mail only from the People I Know. This option allows you to list those people from whom you want to accept email. All other people will be blocked. Although this is a nice safety option for a child, it is not recommended for people who receive business emaill at an AOL address as you won’t get the email until you add them to your People I Know List.

Block mail from all senders so that no emails are received.

Use a Customer Sender List. By clicking on the Customer Sender List link users are able to either block all senders and domains listed below or allow only the sends and domains listed by the user. Be sure to click on Save to keep your changes; or

Block mail with pictures or files.

5) At this point, you can decide whether to permanently delete the blocked mail, or send it to a Spam Folder. You can view the Spam Folder at any time by clicking on the link at the bottom of the Email window, or entering Keyword Spam Folder. The folder gives users the options of returning a blocked email to their email listing to read it by clicking on a “This Is Not Spam” button.

6) Users can also click on a box in the Mail and Spam Control window to use AOL’s Advanced Spam Filter which moves filtered emails into the Spam Folder.

7) The last option in this window is to block mail that contains words and phrases from your Custom Word List. Click on Custom Word List, and add the common spam words and other unwanted words to decrease the amount of spam and unwanted mail.

AOL members can update their spam controls continuously, turn spam controls off and on, and add new words or domains to help manage the constant flow of spam that email users are subjected to. When you couple this with the strength of their parental control, the email and spam filters can be a safety feature for those users who have children using AOL. In any case, it certainly makes it a lot easier to read the email you want to read!

Source : http://www.essortment.com

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The Battle of Spam E-Mails

The World Wide Web has changed the face of society in a thousand ways small and large. There are those that spend their days writing, playing games, searching for the newest travel deals, and looking for the best tourist attraction.

No longer do you pick up the phone to find data, no longer do you have to search the paper or bulletin boards for people to pay games with, now you step up to your desk and log onto your computer and then the Internet. It is all waiting for you there.

But guess what else is waiting there? Spammers! These people do not see you as friends, they only see you as a source of income. From Male enhancement to Canadian Pharmcies to everything in between the flow of spam is never ending.

To avoid being afflicted by lots and lots of Spam you need to protect you email address as if it was a prized possession. In fact these Spammers see your email as a prized possession too. Once they have your email it's like opening the flood gates to thousands of Spam messages. The more spam or junk you accept the more that will come in. Its like if you allow on person that is not a family member know your email address it seems like dozens then hundreds soon know your name and worse your email address.

If that was not enough a lot of popular domains have become the target for dozens of the more technically saavy junk email senders who have found the way to send to a domain without knowing the whole email address. That is not good for you. There are blocking lists and blocking programs that are available to help you with the constant attacks.

One of these is SpamCop Blocking List (SCBL). This list is a collection of IP address that have been reported for sending spam emails. Once SpamCop has seen the IP address enough it is immediately blocked and then it keeps you from being affected.

There is also a bunch of software programs designed to help with Spam. Microsoft's Outlook, a popular email client, has it's own tools and many Anti-virus companies, such as McAffee have developed ways to help with Spam. With every new generation of Spammer created they find a way to get past the newest protection.

The fact is Spam is here to stay and it is only a matter of the technology getting better at protecting. The only way to stop spam forever is to legislate a way to punish those that send the spam so that it is no longer profitable to find a way to get their spam into your Email box. If that will ever happen, only time will tell. Either way you should protect youself with the best spam blocking software or services that you can find.

Source : ezines , Jake Ruston

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