What is Email Spam?

Email Spam is characterized by the reception of unsolicited messages sent in bulk to a network of contacts, usually for advertising purposes. Recent studies have shown that up to 60 percent of the worldwide e-mail traffic is SPAM.

How to Avoid Email Spam

Do not disclose the mass email with the publication in the same sites;

Use different emails for different purposes, for example an email to personal contacts and other sites for inclusion in the information or subscriptions;

Report the spam messages received in their e-mail service, the more easily relate patterns of transmission are identified, refining the filters;

Do not send emails to the entire list of contacts, they are also forwarded in mass and contacts will be a good target for spammers;

Never respond to emails from spam, thus demonstrating that the email remains active and will continue to be victims of unwanted emails.

Anti Spam Tools

Spam can be fought at three different levels: network, server and personal pc.

At the network level there are dedicate hardware for detection of illicit traffic including spam. These machines are called "Security Appliances" and should be deployed and managed by the network administrator.

At the server level it is possible to implement a spam detector common to all accounts and should be deployed and periodically updated by the service administrator. Usually the spam messages are marked with a value that characterizes the proximity of one specific message to common spam messages. Messages with a spam proximity value above a specified threshold will be marked as spam and will not be directly delivered to the end user, usually is stored in a particular folder that the end user can access to verify if some message was erroneously classified as spam.

At the personal Pc level, the end user as the main role in using application with adaptive filters that will learn which messages are spam based on the user's feedback and mark future messages according with that learned profile.