Welcome to...SPAMmmalot

	Figure 1: Never heard of Chris Newton..
	Ok, just for fun... Here is a link to a youtube video of a legomation version of Monty Python's Holy Graile Camelot musical number: "Welcome to Camelot!" Hence the name of this blog. (video opens a new window) Back to the topic at hand. Spam is just like junk mail in your US Mailbox only this comes unsolicited to your email inbox. The original spammers decided they wanted to send an advertisement to everyone with an America Online email address. To do this, they sent the message to all@aol.com The biggest problem is ... it worked. It took a lot of scrambling at America online to come up a solution that would prevent this from happening again. Once word of this got out, all major email sites (gmail, msn, hotmail, etc) all had to come up with their own protective measures. (By the way the original spammers spent time in a federal penetentiary.) Now spam is an everyday occurance. Because the spammers are getting smarter and more creative, this is an ongoing issue. Not only do any email servers have to deal with this, Microsoft is constantly sending out security updates to "patch" the latest hole found by spammers (and other hackers). Why do Spammers do this? Advertisers are paying good money for new ways to get their word out. If your email address is valid, they can capture it and sell it (see Blog: Phishing Scam) Different companies "Pay per click" for people who only visit a website People actually buy the stuff the spammers are advertising. (if it didn't pay, they wouldn't do it) So what do we do about it? Things to look for: Messages from people that DON'T have your email address Exact subject lines really poor gramar mispelling that they should know better If you see these, CERTAINLY DON'T OPEN THEM !! and Turn on your spam filter. Don't just delete them, (please read on.) Hopefully your email providor has an active spam filter. IF your email is through a major providor like hotmail, yahoo, gmail, msn, etc, you are in pretty good luck. These providors have very good spam filters. The important thing you must do is to mark anything you consider spam as such. If you don't, they won't know how to keep your inbox as clean as possible. I have personally worked with spam filters through post.ini and they CAN be very successful and accurate, but again, you must do your part. look at figure 2:
	Figure 2: I may aready be a winner !?!
	This is from yahoo and from within the message ( I opened this one) you can click the [spam] button. If you see this while viewing your inbox, check the box next to the message you want to mark as spam then click the [spam] or [junk] button. Doing this will tell the mail server to be on the lookout for similar messages. As I said, I was working with a spam filter and looking through what it trapped, it was obvious that these were spam. I don't have it to show you, but 25 of the same messages went through a company's mail server. When they were trapped, they were all together and it was simple to see. You usually only get one message at a time and they usually don't look the same, so it may be harder for you to see it. But I'm sure that you really didn't ask for (all in the same week) 23 messages about male body part enhancement, 14 messages about how to get paid to work at home 9 messages about discount pharmacy 51 messages about buying semi-legal software etc. So once you see the pattern, you can mark them as spam. With Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. I have seen significant reduction in spam IF I actively marked messages as such. It usually takes about two weeks and then you can say, "My inbox is pretty manageable.".
	Figure 3: personal note from the Director of the FBI... Right !
	P.S. I will bet big money every one of the illustrations in this blog are from messages with viruses in the attachments just begging to be opened. Read all three (subject lines and limited message text) do you see the pattern? They all have a tiny attachment and give no details in the message, so you are sorely tempted to open the attachment. Why do I not know for sure? Because I marked them as spam and deleted them.