Spam prevention

31. May 2009 by amal.

All of us are e-intruded by spams email everyday in various manner. It could be in the form of simple forward bringing luck, prosperity or lack of it the email is not forwarded.  Most of the time propensity to forward increases by the emotional subject such as “missing child since Tsunami attack”, “raising charity by forward”, e-petition on various affairs such as election, green environment etc.  Statistics reveal spam propagation spread across all the levels of internet/e-mail users be it industry (IT/non-IT), demographic (developed economics- US, UK, Israel, Australia etc, developing economics - BRIC and under-developed nations), age-segments (Teen, middle-aged, senior etc).

In terms of pure numbers, there are various counts:

• Spam accounts for 14.5 billion messages globally per day. In other words, spam makes up 45% of all emails
• Average spam: 41.9 msgs/second; max spam: 75.9 msgs/second; Total spam: 3620999 (On the day of May 31st, 2009) (Source: http://www.spamcop.net/spamgraph.shtml?spamstate)
• According to a study by the Radicati Research Group Inc., a research firm based in Palo Alto, California, spam costs businesses $20.5 billion annually in decreased productivity as well as in technical expenses (source: http://www.spamlaws.com/spam-stats.html)

There are multiple mechanism to prevent spams, notably are:

• Spam filters provided by the email service providers
• Social  awareness (internet, corporate focus, consortium recommendation)
• Individual diligence not to forward any mail

Among all of the above mentioned prevention mechanisms, most effective one is individual diligence. It seems mostly spammers rely on the human sensitivity of emotional topics, social/moral responsibility. Individual many times rely on momentary judgment rather than email-authentication of spam vs. non-spam. To break the bandwagon effect, individuals tendency to get swayed needs to be broken.  Individuals can rely on www.snopes.com for the authenticity of any email spam vs. no-spam. Snopes.com have done credible job of maintaining spam emails of various categories and they keep vigil to add more to there list. Reader digest has recently published article on snopes.com as well.

I suggest netizens to rely on individual judgement not to spam and when in doubt rely on snopes.com. Let’s contribute 2 cents towards e-responsibility

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