We are all familiar with word Spam. This is something we encounter almost on a daily basis in our mail inboxes. They waste our precious time and also contribute in spreading malwares. It is expected that in the year 2008, as many as fourty trillion spam messages will be sent across the globe. This is significantly higher than the figure in 2006, when it was 18 trillion messages.

All of us are aware that email filtering software separates good or true email from the rest or spams. But these software or other appliances employed for filtering can go wrong. While a true mail may be blocked, a spam mail can easily pass through the filter to reach your inbox. If a spam mail is successfully filtered, it is generally placed in a separate folder. These folders can be searched later by the user. According to few sources, both individual users and organizations stand to lose not only their energy and time in deleting these spam mails but also have to shell out $0.4 per deleted message. This figure has been calculated after a lot of calculations and predictions by analysts.

Popular filtering techniques

A number of spam filtering mechanisms have been employed over the years to counter it effectively. Occasionally, more than one techniques are also employed. Some of these include:

1] Tarpitting:- These are services on the server which takes a lot of time establishing incoming mails. This technique ensures spam mails will take a lot of time to reach a recipient, thus discouraging the spammer to carry out his task. However, the disadvantage is that the same procedure hampers the true mails as well.

2] Graylisting:- In this case, the recipients mail system temporarily rejects all incoming mails. Reciprocal mails are sent as reply with the content being quoted as temporary failure. This technique is employed with the assumption that a real mailer will respond back by sending the mail once again while the spammer loses his patience and will give up on sending further spams.

3] Challenge response:- This technique employs CAPTCHA method to its routine. Mails from unrecongnizable IP addresses are asked to enter the sent CAPTCHA. Humans are able to detect these patterns while the computer fails to do so.

4] Bayesian filters:- This technique analyses the ratio of “good” and “bad” words and assigns a score to each one of them. Based on these scores, spams are filtered out.

You may have have found yourself in the following position. You open your email program, get up to make some coffee and upon your return you find your inbox crammed full of unwanted junk mail. It is going to waste your time (and money!) just to try and sort through this much email on a daily basis and may amount to no more than a hill of beans. You want some anti-spam filtering to help you with sorting your emails.

Email spam has turned out to be a big stealer of time and an irritation for individuals and company employees alike. There are real losses of time and money involved for businesses. Companies want to deal with this unwanted hazard effectively and easily.

Some estimations put the amount of spam email being sent on a daily basis at around 100 billion. That is incredible! Just imagine the total amount of time and bandwith that may be wasted on something which most internet users dislike, even hate.

You need to have an anti-spam filtering program or service that can screen your incoming emails and sort them into wanted emails and suspicious emails. Spam filtering software will do the job for you. It will automatically sort through your emails and send suspicious junk mail to a separate folder.

Installing and regularly updating anti-spam software may help with filtering your emails. It tries to let your regular emails through while stopping unknown e-mails from clogging up your inbox. High quality spam filters are estimated to be up to 98% effective, although they are not always correct in their sorting process. It may happen that an e-mail you would have wanted to read gets thrown into the dustbin.

Adjusting the sensitivity of your spam filter may help to regulate this problem. The higher you set the anti-spam filter sensitivity, the harsher it will sort your incoming emails and the greater the likelihood of it marking an e-mail as spam. It could happen that an important email may be marked as spam and that you never get to read it. In the end it is a balancing act between too much filtering and too little filtering.

AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition is a popular choice for spam protection and protection against virus infections. You can download and use a free edition or buy the full version. You are able to configure your scanning schedules as well as update the software database from the internet. It also boasts email, instant messenger and internet browser protection options.

You should remember that installing and using two different anti-spam software on your computer does not offer you double the protection. Use only one at a time and be sure to uninstall the anti-spam software you are not going to use before installing a new one.

If you have enough bandwith available, it is probably a good thing to let the software check for automatic updates. This will ensure that the anti-spam software stays up to date with the latest data concerning spam mail, virus and spyware.

Anti-spam filtering may save you time and in some cases even money. There are a lot of free anti-spam software available that you may choose to use. They are free, so you do not have to spend a cent to receive spam protection.

Spam email can be stopped or controlled by using a spam filter. Email filtering software can be installed by you on your computer or sometimes your internet service provider may provide a spam filter on their mail server. You will have to contact them for more details.

There are a lot of different spam software that you may choose from. Some are better than others and some you buy and others you may use for free. Popular spam software includes Mailwasher, Spambutcher, McAfee, Cloudmark and others.

Microsoft Office Outlook has some features that helps you to block spam email. The most prominent feature is probably Microsoft’s ‘Junk email Filter’ which screens out spam. Other features include the safe senders list, safe recipients list and blocked senders list.

Spam protection is an important part of managing your electronic mail. Spam protection tools can prevent email address harvesting from happening to you. Keep your computer and email program free from junk email.

There are a few ways how you can prevent spam. You should stop spammers from getting your email address by not posting it directly on your webpage or encrypting it. This prevents the ’spam bots’ from harvesting it. You also need a good spam filter as well as anti-virus software that constantly checks your incoming emails.

Once you have been spammed, you need spam solutions. To check if your email address is published on a website, use the Google search engine and do a search for your email address. Generally speaking your address is at a great risk or already compromised if Google can find it. You may need to remove your email address from any webpages that are displayed in the search results.

Junk mail usually contains advertisements, product reviews or related marketing material that sounds too good to be true. You are tricked into reading the email by a wonderful headline promising riches or the keys to unlock secrets. Do not respond to these emails or click on any of the links. Rather delete them or put them in a separate folder.

You may also receive domain name spam. This normally happens when spammers obtain domain names from the whois database. They then go ahead and send junk email to such commonly used email addresses such as ‘contact@’, ‘webmaster@’ and ‘info@’. You may want to avoid email prefixes such as these that are commonly used in conjunction with domain names.

Control or block unwanted spam by installing a spam filter on your computer or have your internet service provider filter your email on their server. You can use spam blocking software to eliminate spam from your life and save you precious time, inbox space and increase your peace of mind.

Today, the Internet has become an integral part of our lives. It’s a daily routine for us to log onto the internet for banking, shopping, social & business networking, job application, researching, music downloads and on other various important information retrieval, we all depend on internet.

With its worldwide popularity, the risk of Internet crime has also risen considerably. Precaution has always been better then cure so it’s in our hands to safeguard our personal information when we make any online transaction. With every bit of information you transmit through the Internet or store online, the risk of falling victim to the Internet crime also rises. Identity theft is at its all time high! Some of the various gullible trends that have been rising through the Internet include hacking, stalking, fraud, phishing, theft, spreading Malware and harassment! This not only causes a financial distress but more then often leads to the psychological stress.

Some of the ways that can help you to guard your safety in the Internet world and help you escape from falling prey to Cyber Crime are listed below. Do remember, your safety is at your own hands!

Awareness: Before you start the campaign to safeguards yourself from cyber crime, keep in mind that you know about the risks you are going to face! The right knowledge equips you to fight with a right mindset! Awareness is the most important weapon that will come to your rescue at the most difficult times!

Be Vigilant: These days most of the people who surf online are the members of social networking sites. Being social is nice but trusting everyone regarding your personal information can drown you into deep waters! Most of the cyber criminals maintain a good relationship at the start and at later stages they exploit that information for their own good. Do not let them exploit your trust! Be conscientious of the information you share with others online.

Don’t pass your Password: If any link in your email asks for your personal information or your password, quickly mark it as Spam and report it! Most of these emails are used to phish for your personal information. They will allure you with schemes such as ” Congrats! You’ve been chosen winner for a trip to Switzerland”, all excited you may give your information but in the end you’ll realize the big loss you made for yourself! Keep in mind, if you are dealing with a valid organization, it will never ask you for your password. Another way to keep your personal information secure is by changing passwords at some regular intervals. Though make it easy for yourself to remember!

We all enjoy using the Internet. It has been a valuable source of information since almost a decade now! Do not let anyone make it a bad experience for you by making you prey to their bad motives. So, to prevent yourself from becoming a victim to cyber crime keep in mind these basic tips, be vigilant and conscious of the information you share through the intranet connection.

No one likes spam email - customers, clients, and even business owners cannot always handle the amount of spam that comes from one email address placed in a public space on the web. So if you have a website, you will want to check out these five tips that will help to reduce the spam that gets into your inbox.

1. Limit the number of emails that you give out to your customers and post on websites. If you post more than one email address on a website, you will experience twice as many unwanted emails. And if you run a business, you should never post your personal email anywhere on your website.
2. You can include tools such as CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). This is a small box on your website where you can have words or numbers that come up and the visitors to your site will have to type these in before they are allowed to send messages to you. This prevents automated spam from slipping through.
3. Use web forms instead of giving out your email address. This will let your visitors contact you without ever having to see your email address. This may not cut down on all the spam, but at least you know the spam you are getting was typed by a real person.
4. If you need to give out your email address, spell it out on your website. Leave out the @ symbol so that it is harder for spam bots to recognize it as an email address. Customers that want to send you an email will understand what you mean when you spell it out. Better still create a jpg/gif images of your email address, so that the visitor/customer can see your email address, but the spammers will no be able to find it so easily.
5. If all else fails, you can require a registration for your website. This will let visitors leave you comments and questions. This prevents any spam bots from contacting you or pulling your email address from your website.

These tips are just some of the ways that you can prevent spam on your website. There are obviously many more but this should help to heavy reduce the level of spam emails you receive. If you have a paid web hosting service, most providers now have Junk Mail Filtering services including with their hosting plans or at an additional charge.