Good Practices to Shoo... Spammers

Now a days, every communication is on internet which is very vulnerable but a fastest means of communication. There is a possibility that some un-unknown sender will send a junk mail to you. A junk mail is called spam, it can be an un-wanted SMS in your mobile or a comment on your blog, mail in your inbox. Did you got a mail from a person, whom you do not know and did not met with. This is spamming, read the History of spam.








Any thing which is un-knowing or which you do not want is a spam. This could be a mail, a comment on your website etc. Spam can be from a individual sender or an organization.

Organizations ???

Yes there are some organizations which send spams to the e-mails addresses harvested by spammers. Offcourse that is not spamming for organizations rather seen as a means of advertising, but that is a spam for us.

Why do people do Spamming




There is nothing specific about this, but sources say that spamming is a hobby for some spammers and it is also a source for promotion of a product or a company. Like creating a virus and infecting a pc is a Fun for some of its creators, in the same way, spamming is fun for some.



Volume of Spam on Internet

According to Microsoft present CEO, Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates receives four million e-mails per year, most of them being spam. At the same time, Jef Poskenzer, owner of the website acme.com was receiving over one million spam emails per day. According to Sophos developer of e-mail, and network security products such as anti-spam, anti-spyware, anti-virus, last year US topped the rank of most spam receiving state. When we compare the statistics based on the continents, it was Asia with 40 percent.



Spamming is illegal in some countries and legal (with some guidelines) in some. Infact, in Australia, there is a penalty of 2000 USD for individual spammer or 900,000 USD for corporate spammers.








SPAMHAUS hosts the updated list of all the top spammers across the world.


How Do Spammers Get your E-mail Address ?


As we have read above, there are different types of spammers, some do this for fun, some to take revenge etc... Some spammers will be professionals like virus developers. These spammers will create a script or program to find your e-mail address. These programs are called spambots or spam spiders which will crawl through your site to find any @ symbol or any .com like word. If they find such things on your site, will store it to harvest the e-mail address to be spammed. There are other ways in which your e-mail address can be spoofed like hackers spoof your IP address.


How Do I Stop Spamm



We cannot stop spam but we can protect our e-mail address from being spammed. But remember, once you are on the database of spammers then it is very difficult to get out. There are steps in which you can work even if your e-mail address is spammed. Thanks to some of the free services on web which I will be mentioning below

There are many anti-spam softwares, most of them free downloads are available for download on net. Detecting spam based on the content of the e-mail, either by detecting keywords such as “Viagra”, “Cialis” or by statistical means is very popular. If your anti-spam engine is tuned with these type of keywords then you have stopped 10 percent of spamming. But if the word is say (specialist) then this can be mistaken with "Cialis" by some anti-spam engines. That means, if your friend send a joke mail to you mentioning a word “Viagra” in it, them that mail will be treated as a spam by these anti-spam softwares.


Tools to Protect from Being Spammed


As I have mentioned above, Spam spiders look for symbols like @ or .com, to harvest your e-mail address in their pool. So, when ever you mention your e-mail address on a website or blog, write it as

Virasat Dot Khan AT Google Dot Communication.

More such techniques are mentioned by Amit in his blog Digital Inspiration
Postini is a paid service for mail forwarding. This is generally used by corporate organizations today.

Hide your e-mail address published on websites from Spambot. Spambots are the spam spiders which will crawl your site to spoof your e-mail address to hack it or to spam it.

Spambox and mailexpire are also a useful tools. Not to protect from being spammed rather to get important mails from un-known senders. Spambox and mailexpire creates a temporary mailbox in their domain which will direct all the mails sent to that temporary address to your official e-mail address. So, you can give this mail address to the un-known vendor. The best part of this mail address is that, it will expire within the period which you have mentioned. This is a free service, check it out. Thanks to Amit who covered these tool on his blog.

One of the tools CAPTCHAs covered by Amit in his blog is also a good tool to protect your inbox from spammers.

Read more about Spamming

Make your e-mail address less vulnerable to spammers

Hide your e-mail address on websites from spammers

Spam Hunters become a Digg Spammers Best Friend

Spam (Electronics) by Wikipedia