Why Reporting That Spam is Important

Receive a piece of spam email and wonder if you should report it? On almost every email service there is the option to report the message as spam. Many people just simply click the delete button and kiss goodbye to the spam that was sent. Not many people consider reporting the spam message to the email server.

However, reporting that spam message could be helpful.

The reports of spam do get looked at by email servers all over. The goal of these servers is to try and track down what email address or IP address a spammer is using. This can be hard because many spammers use ghost IP addresses or bouncing IP addresses so that they are never caught. However, not all spammers are smart enough to use these techniques and they can often get their services terminated and in some cases have their Internet service suspended depending on the provider of their internet. In some cases countries are actually charging the spammers with invasion of privacy and sometimes fining them or sending them off to jail. The only way for these spammers to be caught is for you to report them to the email service.

Reporting spam can also be helpful to you. Recently some email services have started noticing what email address are sending out spam and when it is clicked as spam the email will automatically delete or be sent to the spam box of the email service. This helps clean up your email box and prevents you from having to dig through hundreds of emails that are filled with spam messages.

Next time that you get that email message that is considered spam. Consider taking the extra time and declaring it spam. It could be helpful not just to yourself but to the whole world. Spammers need to be tracked down and stopped so that our emails can be free of useless spam again.

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The Mystery of the Spam Box

An email box folder littered with spam messages.
Image via Wikipedia

When email was first invented there was no such thing as spam emails. So the options on the side of email servers included: Inbox, Sent, Drafts and Trash. However as time went on and businesses and spammers figured out a way to make quick cash on the spam emails a new option on emails appeared known as the spam box.

The spam box is where suspected spam emails go. Instead of having them automatically deleted the email server will send them to the spam box and allow a person to figure out if they want the email or not. Most spam boxes will delete the emails within 30 days if they have not been checked and moved to the inbox.

How do these email servers know what a spam message is?

Many times these email servers use what is considered a language program to determine spam messages. It looks for words that are known spam messages and puts them in the spam mail so that they do not go into the mail box.

Other times these anti-spam devices on emails will take the messages and send them to the inbox if they notice that there is a huge group of messages coming from an email address. So if a person were to send 10 messages in a matter of 5 minutes they might be triggered as spam because of the amount and repeated messages that are being sent.

The spam box comes in very handy because it allows users to pick and choose what messages they look at. If for some reason a known message gets sent there and it wasn’t supposed to a person can track the email address to the server and it won’t be sent there.

These anti-spam defenses are great ways for people to not be bothered by those pesky spam emails again.

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Spam Filters: How They Work to Keep You Spam Free

Email providers now have a spam filter or spam folder built into their email system. It’s where all the emails that are suspected of spam content go so they do not fill your email box up with endless messages that contain ads, malware and other goodies that a computer user does not want.

Sending emails to the spam filter is an automatic process that the email system does on its own. How does that spam filter know what emails to send there and what ones to keep in your inbox?

Here are some of the techniques used by spam filters provided by an email provider to filter out the spam messages that come to your inbox.

A List of Words. A lot of spam has recoccuring themes to it. Vitamins, fast money and sexual content are the main products put out by spam emails. This allows spam filters to put together a list of words that can be scanned and detected. When that word comes up repeatedly in an email it is marked as spam and never reaches your inbox.

Black List of IP addresses. Many spammers use programs that allow their IP addresses to be similar to each other. A spam filter will take those IP addresses and black list them. If an email from those IP addresses come in then it is sent automatically to the filter.

Timing. A filter will time how long it takes an email to be sent from one address to another. Many times spammers send 10-15 emails in a bulk order. If an email program notices large amounts of emails coming in it will sideline the emails to the bulk folder in case they are being sent by an undetected spammer.

Filters. Email providers are always looking at new trends in spam and learning what is the newest type of spam. They take reoccuring phrases and will put them into the system. If that phrase shows up, it’s marked as spam.

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The Limitations of Spam Filters from Email Providers

In an ideal world that everyone lives in there would be a program that took all the spam messages in the world and made them go away. There would be no more emails asking for you to click a link, buy a product or send money to Africa. They would all just go away and disappear into cyberspace.

Sadly the world doesn’t work that way and people who rely upon email have to trust in the email filtration system of the email provider. As often as those spam filters detect spam messages and send them to a small little folder that is off to the side. There is also the possibility that those spam filtration systems from email providers has a lot of limitations. There’s only so much a spam filter can do.

Here are some of the limitations of spam filters through the email provider.

The Double Check System. Due to the fact that many legitimate emails get sent to the spam folder, email users must do what is almost a double check system. They need to regularly check both their regular inbox and the spam folder to make sure that nothing is lost. Genuine emails get sent to the spam folder and are lost forever. It’s always important to check both on a daily basis.

Blocking Real People. The IP address blacklist is a good idea in theory. However, some real IP addresses are so close to these blacklisted IP addresses that it causes them to be blocked. Sometimes those emails don’t even make it to the spam folder.

False Positives. Using some of the detections that are used to figure out what is spam and what isn’t. There are going to be false positives. If the filter catches words like vitamins, easy money and such it could send the email to the spam folder when it was a regular email sent by a human.

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Anti-Spam Filters’ How Do They Work?

Most people have Bulk Folders or Spam Folders in their email accounts. These are automatically built in to the system so that you don’t have to go in yourself and sort through all of your emails to find which are worthy of reading and which are just trying to sell you something.

Most email accounts have what is called a User Defined Filter. These are filters that you can label yourself. For example, you can create a mailbox or folder within your account to hold all of your “family” emails or one for your “purchases”. Once the emails come in, they will then recognize which ones have the characteristics of the mailboxes you created and it will sort them there. But, you need to help it out. So, if you are receiving emails that are spam, try to note the common words and content that is consistent with all of them. Your email host should have a place that says, “report this as spam”, where you can click on it and it will note that emails from that address is considered spam.

There are also Header Filters, which will look at the actual headers of the email to see if they are fake. The header in an email holds a lot of information that the filter can use to discern if this email is spam or not. The header contains server information, which determines whether the email can be tracked or not. Those that are not able to be tracked are an indication of spam.
Language and Content filters will weed out emails that are not of your common language or logic. If you don’t commonly receive emails about prescription drugs or something in another language, your filter will regard that as spam and place it in that mailbox.

The other filter used is a Permission Filter. If something gets sent to your spam folder, but you want to receive it in your main inbox, you can simply authorize the sender and it will no longer go to your spam mailbox.
With such filters, anti-spam is becoming very useful.

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