Spam, also called Unsolicited Commercial Email or Unsolicited Bulk Email is a major concern for anyone who uses Emails and email services on a regular basis. Spam is mostly a type of commercial advertising which is very cost effective since it hardly costs any money or time to the sender. Moreover, even if a minuscule fraction of the people to whom the mails are sent but the product, the spammer ends up making quite a lot of money and as a result the problem becomes perpetual.

The interrelationship between spams and viruses

Virus makers and spammers go hand in hand in today’s world so that they can compromise innocent user systems and transform these systems into spam sending zombies. The main problem of these combined programs is that they seem extremely legitimate and generate massive amounts of spam. Thus, users should always strive to protect their systems from computer virus and prevent themselves from unknowingly becoming a source of spam.

The effects of spamming on systems

Apart from burgeoning inboxes with unwanted and unsolicited Emails, spam also has serious effects on the various Email services and their different users. Since spam uses different server names and domains, it completely confuses the domain administrators, victims and email services by concealing the true origin of the messages. Further, these spams also hijack real Email addresses from real users and use these Email Id’s as a base for spamming. Several spams have also been quite harmful as they have enticed users to divulge out their personal and financial information by making them believe that the email was a legitimate request from a legitimately authorized source.

The concept of phishing

Our spellings are fine and we definitely do not mean “fishing”. The term phishing refers to a phenomenon where the messages appear to have been sent from a reputed financial information and entices the users to verify sensitive data such as banking id’s, passwords, credit card information, etc. Phishing is one of the worst types of spams since it can financially hurt the users in a bad way.

Thus, one should always ensure that they check the legitimacy of the Emails which they have received and never divulge out their personal or financial information on any Email or Web site as any reputed financial institution will never ask for its customer’s id or password over email.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.