Reading the email made me embarrassed, and i got difficulty to explain to all recipients because my email provider reset my email, and it made all my contacts are gone. So i just explained to my friends who asked me whether my information was true or not.
What is spam? How does it work? Spam is electronics device using to send a message continuously without expected by the recipients. The spammer is a person who do spamming. Generally spam consists of email spam, short message spam, newsgroup usenet spam, web search engine spam, blog spam, wiki spam, line advertisement spam and social network spam.
Another example of spam is electronics post contains advertisement, SMS in cell phone, news in a newsgroup forum contains of the promotion of products with no related to the group activities, spamdexing which taking control of a search engine to take popularity of an URL, no useful news and enter in blog, website guest book, fax transmission spam, TV advertisement and sharing network spam.
Some people said that spam is multidimensional problem. Technically spammers take over network resource. The community of a mailing list called "Spam Brigade" naming spam as "The biggest waste of bandwidth on the internet and usenet."
Lot of money are taken over everyday because it needs a bandwidth to send million spam emails. Everyday people get busy to read and sort the spam emails, it takes our time and server service become slow down.
Because spam is multi aspec problem, so the problem solving also need to be done based on any aspect.
1. Filtering
Filtering is the problem solving, especially from technical aspect. Filtering helps the recipients to classify automatically the "correct" email and spam email, so it would save time and energy. Since there were so many spam created, there were many filtering solution, from a simple filtering solution until using complex algorithm ones, from personal filtering until collaborative one (mass), from free of charge filtering until commercial requirements one.
The example of filtering technology is by using SpamAssassin, it's sysadmin/user to identify the spam. From header detection, words searching in spam until integrated with other filtering system.
2. Blocking
Filtering is not solving the problem. It just support the recipients to sort the mail, actually the spam emails are still in there and increase continuously. So beside filtering, blocking is needed.
Blocking is the action in machine or network level to reject (or choose for not connected) another machine which known as spam original place. The list of naughty machines are kept and updated by certain organization, and the other machine can be used. Although it could make safe of bandwidth belong to the networks which rejecting the spam, there are two weakness which becoming the critics arguments to the using of the RBL (real black hole) or blocking mechanism.First is the spammer can always send the spam email via another lines, moreover we cannot block all the machine or network to send email to us. Second is more lines to be blocked, more certain emails cannot be received by the recipients because unfortunately the sender enter in the black list.
But without concerning the weakness, the RBL can support us to fight the big spammers. Because they have to find another lines like changing ISP.
3. Reorganizing Email Infrastructural
The third solution is basic solution, but it's not easy to implement. Because email address is a public (no authentication to send email), while sending email is so easy (cheap, it can be through several lines and it doesn't need tools / skills), so there will be motivation for spamming. If the email system is redesigned right now, maybe it would must be added identification mechanism and cryptographic authentication or another methods to make sure that an email address can be set to receive for certain email only from certain people. Or email address can be default temporary. Or even there will be no fixed email address (user@domain.com); emails will be always be change from the senders to the recipients and from time to time. TMDA is one of step to form infrastructure as like that, which the email address is not so public. The vision is, if the email address generally made for not easy to receive emails, so spam would be reduced.
Without reorganizing the infrastructural, at least we can make the email not so publicity by doing email management as:
- Not informing email address to strangers (websites or mailing lists)
- Using different email address to different usages
4. Law
The last step is non technical, fundamentally in treating spam, and it can reduce spam especially from the master or expert class, it is by defining laws to avoid spam. In modern countries, the previous laws have been made to manage another direct marketing activity such as fax or telephone. For example, it's not allowed to call the same number more than once in 12 months. If it's broken, the spam victims can ask for hundred dollars fine. Even if it taken on green table, the spammers can get more loss.
Nowadays, in several modern countries start to talk to avoid spam. In US, so far there's the rule in some states. For example, in California, the message of certain advertisement should be started by "ADV:" or "ADV:ADLT" on the subject of email. Because the message is easy to filter manually, it hopes that motivation of spam will be reduced. Or at Nevada, the first state that aware about spam, sending commercial emails is not allowed, except there's original name and physical address of the sender, it's marked in order to be easy to detect as advertisement, or another requirement. Many states follow the system, and attaching a valid Return-Path is a must and giving the instruction of "REMOVE" (for example), although it's not so useful, because there's no one (except the beginner) who believe in remove list. Europe and Australia also have made the laws about spam. The complete laws can be seen in www.spamlaws.com .
So after reading the article, i hope more people will aware about spam, the loss caused by spamming activity and know how to reduce spam.
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