SPAM is the one thing that is certain with the Internet, and there are few people who have not experienced at least one spam email. Whether annoying or time-wasting, or actually offensive and rude, follow these steps to eliminate it.

Spam type number one- random attacks

Many spam is just sent to random addresses, in the hope of someone receiving them. Try these XX tips to stop random attack spam

1. Do not have a catch-all email address

A catch-all email address will receive all email sent to your domain that does not have a email address set up for it. For example, lskadjfh@yourdomain.com will go to catch-all-email-address@yourdomain.com, whereas a legitimate domain, such as sales@yourdomain, will go to the actual sales@yourdomain.com account.

By turning off a catchall email address, you will greatly reduce random attack spam, since you will only receive the mail of a legitimate address. This does however mean that if a customer sent an email to saels@yourdomain.com by accident, they would receive a mailer-daemon return email, and may be discouraged from buying from you.

2. Do not use common email address

Spammers know that email addresses like sales@your-domain.com are likely to be in use, so target these addresses specifically. Use different addresses to stop this, such as salesdepartment@your-domain.com. This will stop all random attack spam if used in conjunction to tip number one, however as soon as a spammer discovers your new email address, you will need to change it. However, this may pose a problem to a customer when they try to contact you. An auto-responder telling your customer who to email may help, if they email the wrong address.

Spam type number two- targeted spam

The other type of spam is when a spammer discovers your email address from somewhere, and sends email to it.

3. Do not post your email address anywhere on the Internet

Spammers use a spider to collect email addresses from the web, and can discover your email address easily, if you post it. Always either post it as email at your-domain dot com, or better still, use JavaScript to disguise it (scripts are available at javascript-source.com) or post it as an image. This is a very effective way of stopping spam.

4. Always select NOT to have your email address passed on when entering your email address on a form.

This will stop spammers or even legitimate companies from emailing you. Never give an email address to a site which doesn’t look 100% legitimate, as they may spam you. Remember, once one spammer has your email, they will sell it to other spammers.

5. Use a spam filter to reduce spam that reaches your inbox.

They use a number of techniques to decide whether an email is spam, though are occasional wrong, and so could lose you legitimate emails. Good ones to use are MailScanner, and SpamAssassin.

These tips, if follow, should reduce the amount of spam reaching your inbox by a significant amount. Think about doing the following two steps to stop spam for everyone.

6. Sign up to Spamcop
If signed up to Spamcop, you can report all spam to it. It will then find out which data center it was sent from, and will stop the spammer from being able to send spam from that location. While it won’t reduce spam to you that much, it will reduce spam in general, so consider signing up to it.

7. Place a random email address link on your website

If you have a website, consider linking to a random email address script- this will fill the mailing list of the spammer with useless addresses, wasting their time and possibly crashing their server. Ones to use are at http://www.iwebtool.com/webmasters/antispam/ or http://www.bfndevelopment.com/cgi-bin/home/Members/fMail/Contacts/13647/List.html

These tips will all stop spam from reaching you, and will help stop the spread of spam on the Internet. One day, spam might not be around… but until then, have fun spam busting!

Author: Tim Shaw
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Digital TV, HDTV, Satellite TV

The term CAPTCHA may sound strange at first but honestly we’re all using it everyday of our lives. The Internet is a platform that allows us to communicate in quick and economic manner. However, this has its own problems because the Internet is also plagued with spammers and there’s lot of spam and junk mail that’s doing the rounds.

CAPTCHA is the short form for ‘Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.’ It refers to the tests that we have to complete if we wish to send a mail or document. There are various types of CAPTCHA configurations; most commonly we deal with the ones that have a unique mix of numbers and alphabets with maybe a line drawn across them. The letters aren’t written straight and it takes just a few seconds for users to key in what’s typed in the prompt box. This little test may seem unnecessary to a few people but it’s a very powerful tool that internet users have at their disposal.

The computer is a smart device but has its own limitations. A CAPTCHA is a process wherein a computer asks any user to complete a test. Strangely the computer has the intelligence to create and grade the test, but can’t solve it. As such this minor challenge-response test can determine whether users are human or bots because users entering the right answer are accepted as human because of the computers incapacity to solve a CAPTCHA.

Since spamming is an imminent problem Drupal CAPTCHA has become a necessity of sorts. It is known that a great number of Drupal pages are swamped with continuous amounts of spam. Of course the use of various modules are intended to control the spamming brigade and filter spam before it reaches this sector, the use of Drupal CAPTCHA is thought to be effective. Apart from all the spam protection that’s already incorporated the use of Drupal CAPTCHA compliments the protection process. The module simply adds a CAPTCHA to all forms used by users and guests. Users simply need to answer the test for the form to be submitted.

Since there’s a real need for CAPTCHA, make sure you select a reputed CAPTCHA Service to ensure the best interests of your company and users. CAPTCHA Service providers will make available CAPTCHA that is compatible with varying programming languages. To ensure that that the service does not go kaput, providers may guarantee a backup server in a remote network that will keep the system running despite hosting or network problems. You could choose to check a free test from probable service providers before confirming business with anyone.

The term CAPTCHA came into being in 2000 when Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper and John Langford put their heads together. In case users have a disability or genuinely find it difficult to read the CAPTCHA correctly, for accessibility reasons the use of CAPTCHA audio versions is recommended for those using the service. It may also be referred to as a reverse Turing test since it is used by a computer to test humans rather than the other way round.

Author: Jay Blaze
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Cellphone news

E-mail is now being abused. The flow of spam on the Internet is the proof. It is annoying to download hundreds of disgusting spam emails into the inbox looking for some legitimate messages. Not only you waste your valuable time to delete junk emails by hand, you also waste your money as each spam message in your inbox takes precious kilobytes of bandwidth you paid for. In addition, spam messages can contain viruses, which can infect your computer system, and hidden tracking codes, which work as soon as you click on the message and let the spammer know that your email address is valid. With all that said, it would be great to delete the messages that you dont want to receive beforehand and launch your email client to pull down only good emails. Anti-spam software can do this for you. It helps you fight against annoying spam.

There is a wide choice of anti-spam filters available on the Internet. The common services or features they offer are:

Whitelist and Blacklist. The decision whether an email message is spam or good is taken based on the senders email address. The whitelist contains friendly email addresses, and the blacklist contains potential spammers, or simply people you dont want to communicate with.

Filtering based on the message subject or content. Some words or phrases are met in spam emails more often than others. These are usually vulgar or adult words (sometimes too offending). Thus, filtering based on a keyword is rather helpful.

Virus scanning. There is possibility that spam email contains a virus in the attachment. Certain anti-spam programs allow you block emails with various suspicious attachments.

Automatic spam detection. Some anti-spam filters can check inbound email and delete the emails they consider as spam automatically at a regular basis.

Email recovering. Some spam blockers provide you with the ability to move spam emails to a quarantine folder and keep them for a fixed number of days. In addition, there is the possibility to recover an email from the trash if you need it.

So, with the great features and benefits that antispam software offers, you can now easily block the majority of spam emails.

Author: Jilia Gulevich
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Latest trends in mobile phone

Battling spam is just like fighting any other activity that is illegal and needs to be fought in many areas. There are some easy steps that you can take to minimize the impact of spam in your email, as discussed in Part I. However, the webmaster of your email service has many more tools they can use to fight spam.

The effort would be small if a spammer had to collect email addresses one by one. This is why they take advantage of programming that is automated, such as using a spambot. A spambot is a program that looks through Internet websites for legitimate email addresses. These addresses are then “harvested” and put into huge lists.

The best way to deal with spammers is by raising their cost without putting too much of your own effort into it. Some of the techniques described in Part I can also be used by a webmaster.

CAMOUFLAGE

A spambot will only do what it has been told to do through a program. Many times a spambot will pass you by simply if you’ve disguised your email address. This is because a spambot is usually programmed to search for character strings that look like this: Jane_email@emailaddressdomain.com. You can fool a spambot by changing the email to Jane_email_at_NOSPAMemailaddressdomain.com.

Should the disguised email address be harvested by a spambot it will still need to “scrubbed” before it can be used. A program for scrubbing can be difficult to write since there are many variations that are possible, such as NO_SPAM and no*spam. Try to be as creative as possible.

There is a disadvantage to the above method: you need to remember to take out the extra letters as well as put in th@ sign.

You can make an email address impossible to harvest by putting it into a graphic instead of plain text or mailto:. Not many spambots are smart enough to translate a graphic and understand the pixel pattern as text that is usable. This is particularly true since graphics can have many shapes. Again, this method can be inconvenient because you won’t just be able to reply to this address or copy and paste it.

Another approach is to get rid of the accessbile and visible email address completely. You can use a form for feedback that stores data in areas where a spambot can’t search. You can also store the data inside of easy to write code that is difficult to decipher due to encryption. An example of this would be javascript.

BARRIERS

Communication becomes more difficult between trusted sources when visible email addresses are hidden in graphics or banned from visibility. You want to hinder the spammer by putting a block on any spambots that are known.

Many times they will have a signature that is easily seen through an IP address that is well known or a process name (and sometimes both). Other times they can search for User-Agents that are a non-browser form.

Webmasters can easily block IP addresses as well as block any unwanted processes. The webmaster just needs to begin a cron job that will scan the network for the name of a process and then terminate any IDs that are associated with the process.

A more experienced webmaster will have a daemon that will sleep until that time when a process name is noticed. The daemon will then “wake up” and terminate the process before any spam harvesting can occur. Sample programs, which are only a bit harder to implement, can be used and are available online.

You can get traps for spambots that will block any request that is incoming simply based on search patterns and behaviors. This method to fight spam is slightly more difficult to set up and attend to because it needs certain patterns to define it, changing the pattern slightly for different spambots. How-to information and sample perl programs are available online.

RAISE THE PRICE

After time most spammers will tire of trying different variations in programming just to get email addresses, making the reward much less than the effort. This is what you want to do: make the spammer cost much higher than the reward which will make your reward much more than the effort.

A spammer won’t give up until there is no profit in the effort. US legislation, such as CAN-SPAM, has only seemed to deter businesses that are legitimate and that were never the guilty ones to begin with.

There are, however, some things being done to reduce the problem of spam to just an annoyance: there are penalties for sending spam, filters for junk mail are becoming smarter, and there are proposals underway that include needing a mailer ID.

This is all bad news for the spammer while at the same time is great for the rest of us computer users.

Author: Paul Wilcox
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Digital Camera Information

When you do have the exim queue on the server full of spam, so full that you cannot even open the WHM email queue or the CSF email page because it takes ages, here is a very handy script that will help you deleting the exim queue selectively, from the same SSH command line. That is, you can delete only that long list of messages of the user spamming without affecting the good users emails:
DelExim script

Obviously use with care. Deleting things is always a non reversible process, so if you are too strict and you put a regex string too wide it may delete good stuff. Try to be very specific at the beginning and do it in several passes. You can run the script as many times as neeced, so first you can try ‘nobody@<server name>’, then the ‘@<account spamming name>’ and so on. But as soon as you can open the email queue it is good to finish the job with WHM email queue or even better, CMQ (ConfigServer Mail Queue) an addon to WHM that is really handy when having to deal with large lists of emails to refine them