Hello, dear readers of the blog site. You've probably already encountered spam, even if you didn't know exactly what this outrage is called. And for this it is not even necessary. Spam also pours into your regular mailbox with enviable regularity - these are the same countless advertising booklets that are slipped to you in the hope that you will order or buy something.
So, spam is that is precisely the annoying one, creeping in from all sides advertising(but not only advertising - there are worse things). You didn’t order it, you don’t need it, but he rushes and rushes from every corner. The information you need can easily get lost in this heap and you have to spend a lot of time sifting through it.
In our computer age, the main source of spam. And besides advertising spam mailings can also be dangerous both for your wallet (phishing, social engineering, scams) and for your computer (viruses, worms, Trojans).
What does the word Spam mean, what does it look like and how can you fight it, you will learn by looking at this short article. I hope it will be interesting (well, certainly useful - I promise you that).
Self word Spam comes from the name of canned meat, which was vigorously advertised after the end of the Second World War (obviously, it was necessary to urgently sell out the soldiers' meat rations).
The advertising was so aggressive, comprehensive and ubiquitous that this word (and the “sediment” associated with it) was remembered, but only because of the intrusive advertising that appeared along with it in conferences (then still on the Fidonet, if anyone remembers).
The word stuck, especially since intrusive advertising did not become less, but rather the opposite. When email gained popularity, unauthorized mass advertising and malicious mailings became commonplace. Such mailings were profitable for spammers, because the necessary information was communicated to a large number of people without any special costs.
But It's not limited to email. They spam in private messages on social networks, on forums, in instant messengers, on message boards, in comments to blogs, open for editing and adding text by anyone. They will also spam your phone, for example by calling you advertising or sending advertising SMS messages.
Those. all letters in your mailbox (or forum messages, blog comments, personal messages) of an advertising or other nature from a sender unknown to you - this is spam. True, the newsletters you have subscribed to can also be intrusive, but you can still unsubscribe from them (refuse to receive them further).
Spam itself is annoying and annoying, because it litters where it appears. Most often, this is your inbox, and it can be quite difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff when there are too many unwanted messages. But spam can also pose a real danger to both you and your computer. Let's figure this out.
From now on I will mainly talk about spam messages arriving by email, because it is this channel that is considered especially susceptible to this phenomenon. Everything else is not as neglected and is not so actively used by spammers, and this does not apply to all network users. But the problem of protecting them from unwanted messages is acute.
While regular (harmless) spam may only have a slight impact on your peace of mind and mental health, the examples below can be quite dangerous for your wallet or computer. And this is no joke.
I myself (the one who teaches and trains everyone) a couple of years ago “bought” a similar type of letter (phishing) and parted with several thousand rubles (read “”). I just got wrapped up and did everything “automatically” just to get behind, well, when I realized it, it was too late.
Those who collect a database of addresses essentially don’t care who owns this or that address - they send letters to everyone, because there will still be someone who will respond to them (as they say - they hit the squares).
But still, in order to optimize costs and increase the return on mailings, it is beneficial for them to clear the databases of non-existent addresses. How do they do it? Let's get a look.
In general, as soon as your mailbox is “verified,” spammers won’t just leave you. It is important to understand that no one is immune from spam. But it is possible significantly reduce the likelihood of getting into such a spam database if you take the following precautions:
These were all preventive measures to combat spam (or rather, reduce its quantity). But there is the possibility of an effective fight even in an already completely neglected situation. In this case, it becomes extremely important.
The fact is that in such large services as or, there are powerful antispam filters.
They place all suspicious emails in a separate Spam folder, thereby freeing the Inbox from junk. Yes, there is no perfect spam cutter, and whenever possible, before cleaning, it would be better to view the contents of the Spam folder diagonally to see if it contains legitimate correspondence. But it’s still much easier than digging through all this garbage all the time.
If you have a mailbox on another service, where the spam cutting is poor (for example, as in), then you shouldn’t despair. Get yourself an Email on Gmail or Yandex, and then set up mail forwarding to it from your old mailbox. Moreover, these settings can be made as in the old mailbox (i.e. set up forwarding - shown in the screenshot):
Also, in the new mailbox, you can configure the collection of mail from your existing Emails (the screenshot shows the settings for collecting mail in Gmail):
The same can be said about email client programs. Most of them also have a built-in spam cutter.
But in this case we should not forget that the mail service will have its own spam folder. this can be corrected in the settings of the service or client program).
Good luck to you! See you soon on the pages of the blog site
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Every Internet user has at least once received an email from an unknown recipient.
Political advertising, a call to go to a website, or an offer for a promotional product have repeatedly cluttered the mailbox, preventing access to important messages. This phenomenon is called unsolicited sending of information or in other words - spam.
Interesting! The word “spam” appeared at the beginning of the twentieth century. Then this was the name given to expired canned food that consumers did not buy. One day, the manufacturing company sent a batch of such canned food to the American Navy, emphasizing the need and benefits of these goods. Then spam began to be associated with unwanted mailing that did not bring any benefit.
Today, the definition is most often used in the Internet environment, denoting with this word all types of advertising sent to users without their consent or request.
It's hard to imagine, but 80% of all email content is unsolicited email. Offers of joint cooperation, congratulations on a non-existent win, and even threats are sent to the mail. There are also some very funny messages from foreign spammers who use Google Translate to compose text.
In general, three main groups of such messages can be distinguished:
This question interests many who have encountered such mailings. After all, sometimes the meaning of a message is so veiled that users do not understand why spammers waste their time on such operations. There are still reasons:
Of course, everyone who has encountered “garbage” in their mailbox tries to get rid of annoying letters and restore the correct operation of the device. But this process is not always achieved by pressing one key; sometimes you need to try very hard to protect yourself from “malicious” mail.
No matter how obvious it may sound, the simplest and most reliable email protection against spam is the security measures that every Internet user must take. What not to do while surfing the Internet:
We looked at methods that warn users against malicious mailings, but what should those who made a mistake and disclosed their data to third parties do?
So, a lot of spam is coming to the mail. What to do?
Some messages have a special button that allows you to refuse unwanted mailings. But here you need to be very careful. The fact is that many scammers use this button to signal that the mail is active, and vice versa, they add the address to the priority list for mailing. That is why it is recommended to use this option only when letters come from a known address (for example, from a popular store or company).
The most common and reliable email protection against spam. Filtering occurs automatically and allows you to filter out unnecessary messages from truly important messages. There are two ways email spam filters work:
Each email service has a system for filtering unnecessary messages. We will show the process based on one of the most popular resources. So, how to block spam in Mail?
The first step is to accurately determine the nature of the message, since this method is only suitable for those messages that are undoubtedly spam.
Then you need to follow a few simple steps:
Important! The procedure should be repeated several times. This is necessary so that the mail service remembers the addressee and automatically identifies such messages as spam. Mail anti-spam protection in this case automatically transfers messages to the junk mail folder.
But what if messages do not come to the user, but on the contrary, they are sent from his mail. This situation has become increasingly common lately. Trying to protect themselves, scammers hack mailboxes and send mailing messages from someone else.
So, spam is being sent from my email. What to do?
The most reliable way to protect your mailbox is to change your password. You can use the mail service's prompts or use complex, combined alphanumeric passwords for your account.
Attention! It is unacceptable to use data accessible to attackers as a password: first name, last name and date of birth. Banal passwords are also easy to crack:
11111, 12345 or qwerty1234.
An important step that is necessary for your email to work correctly. There are many programs on the Internet (for example, https://whoer.net/ru) that allow you to quickly check the presence of an IP in the blacklist.
Why is it important? It's simple: if an account is marked as malicious, the correspondence sent will not reach the recipient.
The presented email protection methods are simple and accessible to every user. Remember that eliminating spam begins with applying security measures and non-disclosure of personal data in open sources.
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
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 database”, then “write - it’s gone”, because unsubscribing from such mailings is often not so easy, and sometimes it is simply impossible.
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”).
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
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):
Rice. 1 Mark a letter as spam in Mail_ru mail 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.
Exactly the same procedure as described above for Mail.ru to mark a letter as spam is suitable for the Yandex.ru mailbox.
Rice. 2 Mark the letter as spam in Yandex.ru mail To mark a letter as Spam, you need to
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 can be concluded 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 end up 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.
There are quite a few methods of attracting a person’s attention, but these days spam has become widespread. What is spam and what does it represent?
Regular Internet users, who have been such for quite a long time, most likely already know what spam is, from the fact that they have encountered it more than once in their daily activities. But if most people know about the existence of spam, then their knowledge is usually limited, but spam requires more attention.
Without a doubt, spam is one of the cheapest ways to attract a person's attention. And many advertisers have no qualms about taking advantage of spam. But it’s difficult to get customers for illegal products or materials that even adults don’t need to be familiar with and distribute in a pious way; for this, spam is almost the ideal, and sometimes even the only distribution option.
In everyday understanding, spam can be considered absolutely all unwanted information that sometimes arrives in a not entirely clear way via email, this is certainly correct, but modern spam has long been no longer limited to email. Nowadays spam is distributed not only through the Internet, it is part of the Internet. Spam can be considered the excessive presence of any information with which a person has to meet or even interact without his consent, thereby not only interfering and slowing down his activities, but provoking the emergence of danger both for the confidentiality of personal data and other unfavorable phenomena.
If we rely on the same email, then some messages may not be spam, but let’s say it will be unwanted information. In fact, it would be correct if everyone distinguished for themselves what is junk mail and what is spam.
Spam- this is a mass mailing of unwanted information to users, the vast majority of which are automatic, and who, in turn, do not initially need it. This is a slightly outdated definition, although it can be associated not only with mail, but also with other types of messages.
Self spam concept, is a peculiar disease of the Internet, it applies not only to junk mail, but also to instant messaging services, social networks and even websites, search results, etc. For a spammer, spam in some cases is a way to attract attention, advertising and anti-advertising, and sometimes it is a way to enrich oneself due to the ignorance of the final recipient of information.
Why are mass mailings and mass publications used? Everything is simpler than it might seem, because with a large list of both mailing lists and recipients of information found in other ways, if this is advertising, you can almost easily find more potential clients or attract visitors to the site. Also possible, and usually pursued, is the search for potential victims of fraud.
The term Spam itself comes from the excessive advertising of canned meat products left unconsumed by US soldiers after the end of World War II. They were called spicy or peppered ham from the English. SPICED HAM. People remembered the SPAM they encountered for a long time, and subsequently one of the unintentional mass mailings of e-mail messages was now associated with this parietal in 1993. This was caused by a program written with an error, with the help of which 200 completely identical emails were sent. But that spam was just a mistake, which cannot be said about many current mailings.
As was said earlier, such junk mailings cost the spammer almost nothing, but the recipient can pay quite seriously for incorrect actions. In addition, each Internet provider has its own tariffs and prices, and searching among junk mail and web spam for the necessary information may cost more due to overuse of traffic.
In addition to various methods of independently collecting email addresses, including automated ones, entire organizations engage in this not the most noble method, and mailing lists can also be purchased. Mailing can be carried out using any poorly protected computer, which is possible after activating software specialized for this on it.
The existence of the possibility of receiving a potential threat is no longer uncommon, which could ultimately force or convince someone to transfer any amount of money to an unknown account. This is nothing more than extorting money, and for an attacker, disseminating such information is a simple and sure way. The spammer hopes that due to the large number of spam recipients, someone will respond to it and fall into the trap.
In order not to fall for a scam, you need to understand the meaning of Phishing; this method of mail-out fraud is used to lure out confidential information. Such information may actually be information about a bank account; the attacker’s goal may be to obtain his login and password. Such mailings are disguised as closely as possible as official organizations with their own clones of official websites, on behalf of which the message was supposedly received. As you know, serious organizations do not ask for personal information via email.
Very often, mailings may contain attachments, sometimes even at first you may not understand that the content is a computer virus or an email worm, which, for example, independently distributes itself; they can collect all possible necessary information and send it all to required address.
At the moment, there are quite a lot of spammers, especially among webmasters, who want to leave a link in the comments of a blog or forum, which, with the right approach, can be a plus for his site, but for a site that has too many outgoing links, this can be a death sentence, because this is exactly what The Internet resource will appear spammy to the search engine. Owners of such sites should not forget about the need to moderate posts and comments.
As for bulletin boards, texts very similar to real advertisements can be published, with a large number of outgoing links, and if an inattentive moderator missed this type of spam, then this will affect not only the fact that the search engine will consider the board or site spam, but users will react with A warning to such Internet resources; strange advertisements will arouse suspicion.
More and more often you can stumble upon the supposed blog of taxi driver Roman, who earns millions, weight loss techniques and other sites that are actually useless for humans. Separate sites are being created to praise their site, which, apparently, due to low information content and usefulness, cannot achieve the required traffic. What can we say about filling such sites with machine text? An overabundance of advertising, including pop-up windows that interfere with viewing the necessary information, which are not always easy to close, is the lot of unscrupulous site owners.
Search spam is a type of clogging of search results with sites that do not provide anything useful other than the needs for which the owner created them. These sites very often appear in the first places in the search results, but thanks to constantly improving search algorithms, they also quickly fall under the filter, still be vigilant.
What spam is is most likely already clear from some of the material you’ve read, but social spam is a slightly different method of attracting attention.
For spam on social networks, hacked accounts of the most ordinary users are very often used, accounts can also be created on purpose, and false groups are created. You and your friends may also get into such trouble, and a strange message that arrives can only indicate its not entirely human activity. Just like when you receive suspicious email and spend time on a website, you should be wary of scams.
Often, people who use social networks are invited to groups they don’t need, or invited as friends, since this can be a mass invitation; this method is rightfully considered spam. Many social pages The networks to which attraction is carried out may, just like the sites, have unreliable information and offer poor-quality goods, although this is not a pattern, but the administration is constantly fighting this type of fraud.
SMS messages with advertising or spam have long been common on mobile phones, and here, just like everywhere else, you need to distinguish truth from lies. Otherwise, it is possible to subscribe to paid SMS news channels, the availability of which will only become known over time. Spam for smartphones is not much different; in such messages it often sends links to malicious programs, under the pretext, for example, of looking at a photo or updating the browser.
Several years ago, it was especially popular for a parent to request to top up their account with any amount in connection with a child’s problem, but there were those who fell into such a trap.
No matter how much you would like to have a short and beautiful mailbox name, this will not be a good option to protect yourself from spam, because such addresses most often end up in the mailing list.
If possible, you should refrain from publicly posting your email address in places where everyone can see it. In addition to manual addition, such addresses can be added completely automatically using specialized software to the spam database. Even if such a publication is still required, it must be done with minor changes, for example, change the @ symbol to the word of the same name or separate some characters with a space.
This method will help, at least a little, to protect against automated linking of your email address to the spam database. Actually, approximately this method can be used for ICQ and other network identifiers.
To register on websites, it would be a good idea to have an additional mailbox, thereby protecting your main one. On GSM devices you just need to ignore the incoming message and also not respond to it; the principles of the attackers’ work remain practically unchanged.
If a spam message still reaches you, then you should not follow the links in it and test the security of your computer by opening unknown attachments, and a response to such a message will only confirm that they are using mail and spam has reached the recipient.
Modern email clients provide one of the best ways to combat spam - filtering incoming messages. Although there are a lot of automatic filtering methods, all of them are not ideal, since the most ordinary message can be blocked, so many services create a separate folder for such messages, the contents of which the user can familiarize themselves with.
Also, to combat spam, you can set up rules that automatically transfer messages from regular spam addresses to a specific folder, this is possible with most email clients. As for fighting spam on websites, a lot depends on their owners, and avoiding such web resources is perhaps the best option to protect your computer.
Spam has become so integrated into our lives that many people don’t even notice it. What can we say about the Internet? When asking the question what spam is, you need to look around, on poles, in your mailbox, sometimes you can notice a lot of excessive advertising, which can also be called spam, albeit household.
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. ~
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
Spam on the modern Internet is a reprehensible activity, and the legislation of a number of countries provides for certain types of liability for such activities. For example, in the USA, one of the largest Internet providers America Online (AOL) every month brings several lawsuits against spammers who systematically send advertisements to its clients. ~
Often, users simply do not pay attention to online advertising, deleting such messages from their mailboxes. In fact, the harmfulness of such mailings lies in the fact that it costs the spammer practically nothing, but it is expensive for everyone else, both the recipient of the spam and its provider. A large amount of advertising correspondence can lead to excessive load on the provider's channels and mail servers, which is why regular mail, which recipients may be eagerly awaiting, will travel much slower. The spammer pays virtually nothing for transmitting mail. The recipient of spam pays for everything, paying his provider for the time on the Internet spent on receiving unsolicited correspondence from the mail server.
A spammer has many methods to find out your email address and then send mailings using it. There are a lot of programs that collect the addresses of people writing letters to newsgroups and newsgroups. Such a program is capable of collecting thousands of addresses in an hour and creating a database from them for further sending spam to such addresses. Some of the spammers in their mailing lists offer to purchase a CD with such information for a few dollars. Another method is for spammers to look through various periodicals and extract the email addresses of companies that have advertised.
Differences between Russian spam. If we are talking about Russian spam, then we should highlight several significant differences from foreign spam, as well as all the ensuing consequences:
1. Russian spammers use their real addresses. Therefore, before, for example, blocking access from a certain address, you can contact the person who sends the newsletter or send thanks.
2. Russian spammers do not know how to stop themselves; megabyte Word files may begin to fall in your way, and even with macro viruses (foreign analogues are overwhelmingly short letters with a link to www).
3. Russian spammers do not understand that what they are doing is bad. And it’s not always possible to convince them of this, although I’ve recently stopped trying, I just close the relay.
4. Not all providers of Russian spammers are ready to take measures to get rid of spam, so you have to rely on yourself.
5. Russian spammers take information from various on-line catalogs, CD-ROMs with catalogs and similar sources. So if you got into trouble by registering in some “Who’s Who in the Computer Market...” (all names are fictitious, all coincidences are random), then you will often receive price lists from a wide variety of companies. The common method of scanning newsgroups is extremely rare.
If complaints to the spammer's provider do not give the desired result, and he continues his activities, providers are usually ready to even completely ban receiving mail from the provider's mail server, which encourages the actions of its careless users.
