21-08-2014, 03:51 PM
Over the past couple of years, Internet spam has been a growing menace. This malicious data fills our mailboxes, exhausts the capacity of networks, and poses a significant risk to home users and large corporations alike. In this paper, I hope to shed some light on this emerging issue. Unsolicited e-mail, or spam continues to be a nuisance and hindrance to e-mail users. As filtering and blocking methods progress to mitigate spam so does the sophistication of spammers themselves. The most popular mitigation techniques in use today rely on analysis of e-mail content and sender IP address blacklists to determine whether e-mail is spam or not. These techniques experienced mixed success in mitigating spam. They are fundamentally limited because they work as reactions to spam; spam filters learn to identify spam over time as several pieces are analyzed and tagged as spam. As a result, even the best filters experience delay in adapting to new sources and types of spam. Core problems associated with UBE stem from the very low cost on the sender and the real costs on the recipients and their Destination Operators. There is no other common form of unsolicited communication that shifts so much of the cost of each message onto the recipients. The costs are particularly high on novice users and the Destination Operators who have a preponderance of novice user clients, but the costs are in fact borne by all Internet users. This paper deals with various aspects of spam. It deals with origin, various types, present solutions, spam filtering and evolution etc. It also provides information about methods spammers use to harvest e-mail addresses. Some statistics about the grievousness of his problem are also given. This is followed by a brief history of the evolution of spam. Then the need for spam filters is described followed by a number of commonly used anti-spamming techniques. A brief note on the spam content and its development is also provided. Then various possible locations of the spam filters are explained. Finally, Spamcop, which is a free spam reporting service, is discussed. The main concern today is people’s acceptance. Spammers will persist as long as people are willing to buy their products. These nuisances are, after all, salespeople. Until the general public realizes how malicious these people are and stop buying their products, we will continue to have a major spam problem.