Antispam - a project against email and mobile spam, what is spam. Spam: what is it? Basic anti-spam measures

Have you received promotional emails? Yes? Then you know what spam is. Almost everyone in the world today allocates a huge amount of funds to combat spam. Developers create a variety of programs and scripts that allow them to detect advertising messages and block them, as well as their senders.

Despite this, similar letters continue to arrive. Some of them are actually detected and automatically transferred to the Spam folder (every mail provider now has one); the rest may indeed come to the “Inbox” section.

We will tell you more about email, why it is sent and how to deal with it in this article.

What is spam?

In general, the word “spam” comes from the name of spicy minced meat (pork and beef), the name of which was used in a comedy series in 1971. According to the scriptwriter's idea, in one cafe visitors were so aggressively advertised this product that they literally did not stop using the word “SPAM”. The meaning lay precisely in the constant, excessive and at the same time aggressive repetition of the specified word.

Today, “spam” is the name given to automated mass mailings of advertising correspondence. Unlike simple advertising, such mailings have no effect - they are sent to a huge number of people without a specific purpose: simply hoping that some small part of the recipients will be interested in the offer.

In the era of electronic technology, we all know what spam is. In email, SMS, on social networks and even in regular mailboxes, we can find a lot of messages that are sent on behalf of certain companies offering their services.

Spam can be very intrusive and sometimes even dangerous for the recipient. We'll talk about this in more detail below. In the meantime, more specifically about those who benefit from such mailings.

Who is sending spam?

As already noted, we receive a lot of untargeted advertising offers. All these letters (spam) most often act in the interests of the companies that advertise them (suppliers that are described in the offer). In some cases, spam mailing can be carried out with the aim of achieving the opposite effect - to scare away the consumer in order to annoy a competitor.

Of course, if you find a letter in your mailbox advertising a shoe store, this does not mean that the store itself is sending such mailings. Most likely, the messages were sent from a special server designed for such purposes. And the store owner could simply order such a newsletter.

Another situation is when they try to send you spam with a request or containing some obviously fraudulent offer. For example, these are the well-known “chain letters” stating that some distant rich relative left millions of dollars as an inheritance, and you are required to pay a commission of $200-300. Letters of this nature are most likely sent by simply a group of people who have access to the necessary means (for example, this could be a spam program, a server and a mailing list).

What are they advertising?

If we talk about what is advertised in spam emails, then there are a huge number of options. The newsletter can promote a specific company, product or service, online store or service. In this case, of course, spammers try to act secretly so as not to harm the service provider. For example, legitimate companies will not spam because it is illegal. For this, they can use a lay-out site or a front store.

In other cases, spam may contain links to various sites containing viruses; programs that can harm your computer, pornographic materials, various requests from fake people. Such mailings are carried out precisely by groups of people who simply earn money through illegal means. It could even be hackers - specialists with special knowledge in this area.

Is it profitable?

According to unofficial research, spammers earn millions of dollars annually from their activities. They advertise adult sites, pharmaceutical stores, and send viruses and various fraudulent messages to millions of people. Imagine that, despite the fact that many are aware of what email spam is and how harmful it can be for the recipient, people continue to believe what is written and send money, buy access to websites, tablets and even install programs.

If you give a specific answer, then yes - spam is very profitable. Otherwise they wouldn't be doing it. Just the other side of the coin is the question of how difficult it is to carry out mailing in terms of monetary costs. After all, even a layman understands that a spam program (or some special script) and the servers from which the mailing will be carried out, as well as a lot of other technical nuances, are additional costs that need to be recouped from the profits from the messages sent out. Therefore, it is impossible to say that spamming is a simple activity. A lot of people do this, but only a small part manages to earn really big money here.

Spam in email

In e-mail, spam probably appeared first of all. It was, of course, a particularly effective tool at the very beginning of the development of Internet technologies. Back then, people still didn’t know what spam was, what to do with incoming letters, that no inheritance actually existed, and that money sent using the specified details could be forgotten.

Later, of course, postal services became concerned with the problem of spam. They were forced to introduce the first spammer blocking mechanisms, which were later successfully solved. For the past few years, this is how the anti-spam industry has worked: those who send mailings come up with something new; and the task of mail services is to create a filter that will prevent letters from reaching users.

All modern Internet companies, including Yandex, are struggling with the phenomenon discussed in this article. Spam has become their main enemy, so the search engine development team has been constantly improving methods for selecting advertising letters for several years now. They have had mixed success so far, as unwanted mail continues to arrive.

Spam in other services

In addition to mail, there are a lot of other services where spammers trade. Essentially, these are various forums, blogs, regular websites, message boards, social networks, abandoned resources that are no longer being worked on. This indicates that, despite the fight against this phenomenon, no one knows how to remove spam.

Unless you can learn from the experience of the most technologically advanced players in the IT market - the largest social networks (Facebook, Twitter), where spam is constantly detected and deleted. And then - even there you can find a huge amount of hidden (and not so hidden) spam.

How to fight?

The question just arises: how to deal with such a negative phenomenon? Is it possible to make browser spam stop annoying ordinary users, who, for the most part, are not interested in the products offered?

It is necessary to fight intrusive messages, but it is still impossible to eradicate the concept of spam. The most effective tools are simply automatic and manual control over what users send to each other, as well as some restrictions that can be used to reduce the increase in the number of spam messages.

For example, Gmail has filters that reject messages containing links that are sent in large volumes to different people. Such accounts will be blocked very quickly, and spam letters will not reach their recipients.

The problem with this technique is the many variations in forms of spam. Roughly speaking, it can be sent not only in the form of links and not from one account. In fact, attackers can create multiple accounts on different IP addresses in order to hide their real intentions. It will be more difficult for the Postal Service to detect such activity.

What measures are being taken?

In addition to simply creating filters, mail services are conducting many innovative developments that make it possible to recognize spam in one form or another. With their help, users will not have to think about how to remove spam, and this will make working with mail much more convenient.

However, no one knows how such solutions work and why they still miss intrusive advertising messages. It’s just that in the technology news section, large email providers sometimes publish information about testing new security mechanisms; and over time, you can see how the number of spam messages actually decreases. The working methods of such mechanisms remain a secret.

You have received spam. What to do?

If you see an unsolicited email in your inbox that is clearly advertising (or fraudulent) in nature, don't panic. All you need to do is click the “Mark as spam” button (if your email provider has one) in order to inform the service about the advertising nature of the message. If you don’t have a “This is spam” button, simply delete the email.

Do not under any circumstances follow the links provided there or download the attached files! Don't forget what email spam is! It could be a program that can steal your data or infect your computer.

Responsibility for mailing

If suddenly you would like to try sending spam yourself, we hasten to warn you that this is a criminal activity, including in our country. Therefore, we do not recommend trying it.

Surely each of us, when opening our mailbox, found colorful leaflets containing advertising information. There they offered you to visit some resort, earn a million, be cured of the evil eye, etc.

And only a few, having read these leaflets, found them useful for themselves. It is this kind of sending of information that is called unsolicited advertising, spam mailing or simply spam.

The term "spam" refers primarily to emails. Quite often, almost all email that the recipients have not requested is classified as spam. Recently, experts have studied all types of spam, as a result of which they concluded that if all unwanted or advertising letters are massively classified as spam, there is a danger of losing business mail.

To better understand what spam is, let's look at

Main types of spam

When you get to some sites, you can’t help but pay attention pop-up windows with advertisements of different nature. Such advertising windows generate income for the site author. To increase income, several of these pop-up windows are sometimes installed on the site.

The next type of spam is repeated sending of messages in newsletters (the so-called “ spam mailing"). Each such newsletter is usually devoted to a specific topic. The visitor subscribes to it in the hope of receiving information of interest to him. According to the rules of such mailings, advertising messages are allowed, but with certain restrictions (for example, no more than once a week).

However, those who send spam are of little interest to these rules. They send their advertisements daily to several mailing lists. At the same time, spammers do not pay any attention to the topic. A similar situation with spam mailings can be found in chat rooms, forums and various message boards.

Another type of spam - filling guest books with advertisements. Some resources may contain guest books so that visitors can leave their messages (wishes, comments, suggestions, etc.) in them. However, spammers manage to leave their mark here too. They are not at all interested in the content of sites; they simply find links to guest books and place their advertisements there.

A common type of spam is spam comments to articles on websites and blogs. Such comments, as a rule, do not correspond to the topic of the article on the site, but always contain links to external resources. Such links can be contained both in the text of the comment and in the name of the comment author.

The distinctive feature of such comments is that they are general in nature and therefore suitable for any site. For example, “this is an interesting article” or “the article is useful, but the algorithm is too complex,” and a link to your spam page must be attached.

Some webmasters, in order to attract visitors to their site, try to deceive search engines. They fill the pages of their resource with invisible text that contains the most popular words (free, download, etc.). Invisible text has the same color as the main background of the site, so the site visitor cannot see it. The user types the phrase “download free music” into a search engine, ends up on a site with dubious content and, naturally, does not find anything he wants.

However, the most common type of spam remains sending advertising information by email. If your email address is included in the “spam mailing list”, then “write - it’s gone”, because unsubscribing from such mailings is often not so easy, and sometimes it is simply impossible.

How to fight spam?

How to unsubscribe from spam mailings? This is possible if there is a link at the end of the letter “ cancel subscription", or "unsubscribe". By clicking on this link, you can remove your e-mail from the spam database. Unfortunately, such a link may not be available, so let’s move on to the second option on how you can “break up” with spam mailings.

Comments on the site containing spam must be deleted by the site author manually or using a special plugin.

It is better not to visit sites of dubious content with a bunch of pop-up windows at all, in order to avoid the possibility of picking up viruses on your computer, which can be missed by any antivirus (“even an old woman can get screwed”).

How to fight spam in Mail.ru mail?

Before we start fighting spam, I want to emphasize that some important and necessary emails end up in Spam by mistake. Therefore, sometimes it is useful to look into the Spam folder, especially if you are waiting for some letter, but it still doesn’t come.

You can explain to your mail server at mail.ru that such letters should be sent to spam.
Let's figure it out

What does it mean to mark as spam?

First, you need to select the letter by checking the box next to it (number 1 in Fig. 1, click on the picture to enlarge it):

Now click on the “Spam” command (number 2 in Fig. 1). This command will only act on letters that have a checkmark next to them (that is, on selected letters). As a result, the letter will be moved to the Spam folder, and the mail.ru mail server will remember the sender as a spammer. This is how the manual “mark as spam” procedure works.

If you wish, you can delete a letter from the Spam folder by clicking on the “Clear” command (number 3 in Fig. 1), although after 30 days, letters from the Spam folder will be automatically deleted.

I would like to note that the procedure for sending a letter to Spam may have to be repeated several times. Because the mail server may not understand from the first (and even the second) time that you want to teach it to send letters from this sender directly to Spam. It’s not for nothing that they say that “repetition is the mother of learning”; this rule also applies to mail servers.

How to fight spam in Yandex.ru mail?

Exactly the same procedure as described above for Mail.ru to mark a letter as spam is suitable for the Yandex.ru mailbox.

To mark an email as Spam, you need to

• first check the box next to the letter (number 1 in Fig. 2),
• click on the “This is spam” button (number 2 in Fig. 2),
• Click on the brush to clear the Spam folder (number 3 in Fig. 2). But this is not necessary, because after 30 days such letters are automatically deleted from the Spam folder.

Should I mark a newsletter as Spam if it was previously useful?

There are newsletters that you yourself subscribed to. For some time, this newsletter was useful and interesting to you. Time has passed, the information from the newsletter has become boring, boring, uninteresting, etc. Should such mailings be marked as Spam?

By marking a mailing as Spam, you signal the mail server (on Yandex, Mail ru, etc.) to send letters from this author to Spam. Therefore, the mail server for ALL Internet users (not just you) will send letters from such an author to Spam.

This is NOT always fair to other Internet users who may need this information. In such cases, it will be fair and just unsubscribe from such mailings without marking them as Spam.
What conclusion can be drawn from the above?

Spam is information that we did not request, did not subscribe to, and is imposed on us.

However, let’s not forget that “when the forest is cut down, the chips fly.” Therefore, it is necessary to sometimes look into the Spam folder, because important letters may accidentally appear there.

We fight other spam to the best of our ability. It is often better to unsubscribe from a mailing that has become irrelevant than to mark it as spam.

SPAM is unsolicited information. That is, you don’t want something, but you get it. For example: You use your mailbox for business correspondence, but besides this, you are forced to read some other advertisement every day. ~

Who needs SPAM and why?

The vast majority of SPAM is used for advertising. Usually some product or service is advertised, sometimes to increase counters on the site, less often to send viruses and/or Trojans. But there is a common goal - to bring your information to the maximum possible number of recipients at minimal cost. Moreover, the “authors” do not care about the composition of the audience, the main thing is the quantity

The Internet is spam. What it is? To summarize, we can say that spam is unsolicited advertising. That is, electronic mailing of advertisements that are sent to users without their consent.

What types of spam are there?

To learn how to recognize spam almost immediately, you first need to understand what it can look like. Here are the main ones that can be sent to your mailbox:

1. Toll calls. The letter, as a rule, eloquently advertises a specific product or service. At the end there is a phone number, by calling which you can supposedly order it. It would seem, what’s the catch here? But it's not that simple. By dialing the specified number, you will only hear a faceless answering machine, and then you will receive a fairly impressive bill for the call.
2. Offers to join Such mailings take up the lion's share of everything that we include in the concept of "spam". What this is, of course, is not stated directly in the letter itself. First, you will be described with brilliant prospects (for example, “Earn $100,000 in just a month!”) or something like that. And under a plausible pretext (deposit, down payment, etc.) you are urged to send a certain amount of money to the specified address. Of course, you won’t get fabulous money or even a refund of your funds.
3. Suggestions to visit a specific site. Of course, this is also done in a very veiled manner. As a rule, spammers create letters that are very similar to personal correspondence. For example, it could be something like: “Hello, friend! Do you remember me? We studied together at school since the seventh grade, I barely found you :) How is life? Look, I’ve created my website with photos here. .. ". The following is the link. Its presence is a prerequisite, because it is important for the spammer that you click on it. Please note that in such letters they will not call you by your name, but will replace it with “friend”, “cat”, “dear”, etc. In addition, instead of your name, the first part of your e-mail may be present (that is, what comes before the @ symbol). For example, if your email is called “krasnoe_yabloko@****.***”, then you may receive a letter starting with “Hello, krasnoe_yabloko!...”.
4. Data collection. Under the pretext of a survey or questionnaire, you are asked to enter your data and send it to a certain address.
5. Sending Trojans. This is the most dangerous spam. What it is? By opening such a message, you introduce a Trojan computer virus into your system, which collects information (passwords, phone numbers, data from personal correspondence, information about your provider), and then sends it to spammers, who can use what they receive for their own purposes.

Why is it necessary to fight spam?

Now that you have a general idea, you most likely no longer doubt that you simply need to fight them. Additionally, it should be noted that users whose computers were included in the spam network are faced with severe Internet slowdown. This is usually due to the fact that mass mailings take over all the traffic.

How to protect yourself from spam?

Spam protection is a matter that needs to be approached responsibly from the very beginning.

Firstly, if you often have to register on different resources, receive activation codes, etc., it is better to create a separate mailbox for this purpose. And let the main one fulfill its original purpose and serve for correspondence with colleagues, clients and friends, as well as for receiving news and advertising, but only what is interesting and necessary for you personally.

You should not leave your email address on various forums and other popular resources. If there is still a need for this, separate the characters with spaces, replace the “@” sign with the inscription “woof”, “dog” or something like that. This way there will be a chance that the bot will not add you to the spam database. However, modern bots are becoming more and more advanced in this regard. Therefore, a more logical solution would be to insert a picture with a written e-mail instead of text. Of course, it will be a little inconvenient for users to manually enter your address, but you will be 100% protected from spam.

Never respond to spam. You already know what it is, what it can bring to you. Now imagine that after you respond (even if you say that their offer does not interest you), the number of spam attacks on your mailbox will increase several times!

Spam filters - a modern and practical solution to the problem

Spam filters are specialized programs that automatically filter out and delete all messages with suspicious content. The anti-spam function is present in most modern anti-virus programs (Dr.Web, Kaspersky Lab, Avast, Avira, AVG, etc.). However, from time to time you will have to look at the Spam folder - sometimes necessary and important letters end up there.

Spam is something every network user is familiar with.

In the most common sense, spam is the mass sending of advertising emails to users who have not given their consent.

Nowadays spam has many more meanings and variations: SMS spam, spam on social networks, and so on. But let's start with the origin of the word itself.

Term

The word “spam” itself, or rather the English version “spam”, has a rather funny origin. SPAM was originally a trademark of an American company; Under this brand, canned meat began to be produced in 1936, of which so much was produced during the Second World War that an urgent advertising campaign had to be carried out - it was necessary to sell them before the expiration date. These canned foods were advertised everywhere, and were also advertised on the radio.

This situation was played out in one of the episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus, and the word SPAM acquired its current meaning in 1986, when many identical messages from financial pyramid advertisements appeared.

Currently, the amount of spam varies from year to year. For example, in 2017, the share of spam in total email traffic was slightly more than half, 56.63%; Moreover, the largest amount of spam (more than 13%) came from the USA.

Types of spam

1. Bulk mailing- the most famous type of spam. Spammers buy databases of email addresses and then send emails with commercial offers (which most often contain viruses, phishing, and so on).
2. Messages on social networks and instant messengers. Previously, these were the same advertising messages as in letters, but now a scheme is becoming popular when a user’s account is hacked, and then messages are sent on his behalf asking him to transfer a certain amount of money.
3. Spam on forums. Spammers are also active on forums: they leave messages in discussions and send private messages to users. Sometimes this is used to build up the link mass of a site.
4. Spam in comments on the site. The type of spam that website owners hate the most. The goal of spammers is still the same - either to advertise their goods or services, or to increase subject citation index(tIC).
5. Spam in catalogs and message boards. Directories are used to promote websites (although less so now), and message boards are used for fraudulent advertisements.
6. Spam via SMS. As with sending letters, spammers buy databases of mobile operator users and send spam messages of an advertising or fraudulent nature.

Safe and dangerous spam

Spam messages can be divided into two large groups - safe and dangerous. The first ones are unpleasant, but they only threaten to ruin your mood and waste time, but the second ones can harm your computer and finances.

Safe spam

1. Advertising of legal goods or services. These are ordinary letters of an advertising nature, with the difference that users did not give their permission to receive them.
2. Advertising of goods or services prohibited by law. If the law prohibits advertising a product or service, then spammers begin to actively use mailings; they have nothing to lose.
3. Compromising letters. May be related to politics; are sent with the aim of discrediting competitors, and can also be sent supposedly on behalf of competitors in order to change opinions about them for the worse.
4. "Letters of happiness." Messages (including in instant messengers) with a request to forward a text to other users so that something good happens or something bad doesn’t happen. Sometimes such letters are used by spammers to collect a database of addresses for subsequent mailings.

Dangerous spam

In general, spam is far from a harmless thing, so any messages that look like spam should be treated very carefully.

How to deal with email spam

In order to reduce the amount of spam in your mail as much as possible, you need to start by understandinghow users get on mailing lists.

1. Inattention when registering on the site. Often, in the registration form there is already a checkbox indicating consent to receive advertising materials. However, in this case it is not difficult to refuse spam: at the end of each letter there should be an “Unsubscribe” link.
2. Breaking. Fraudsters hack websites and user emails and gain access to databases (contacts).
3. Sale. Address databases, unfortunately, are sometimes sold by website employees themselves.
4. Phishing. The user enters his data on fake sites.

What to do?

The main advice that has repeatedly shown its effectiveness:

register at least two email addresses. One for personal and work contacts, and the second for registration on commercial sites, sites with dubious content, and so on.

The next tip is to choose a reliable email service (for example, Gmail ). In such email services, spam filtering works well, so most of the fraudulent emails will go straight to the Spam folder.

If some letter nevertheless “breaks through” into the main letter folder, be sure to mark it as spam - all further letters from this user will end up there.

You can also use filters and create rules to get rid of spam (for example, in Yandex mail).

Conclusion

Spam is a serious problem - mainly due to the dangerous links and files that can be found inside the email, spam is a serious problem, especially for unsophisticated users. Therefore, even if you are sure that you will never fall for scammers, be sure to tell your family and friends about the dangers.