Review on Internet Security on ecommerze.blogspot.com

New Spamming Tactics

In the post, spamming is defined as the flooding of the electronic mail systems with "junk e-mail". The writer discussed about the new tactics of spamming which are the PDF spam, Piggyback spam, and Greeting Card spam. The post continues on to explain what are these kind of spams and includes solutions for them.

Well, we in E-commerce Gazette also give a thumbs up to this post as we ourselves find spam to be very problematic as well.

Every now and then, we do receive emails such as the PDF spam, and without any knowledge, we download the file, and our computers get infected by sypwares, trojans, and viruses as well.

So, how are you going to eliminate the viruses after infected by it?

What you need to do is just by following the Do's and Don'ts to prevent it.

Don't:

Do not click any link in the spam mail and never ever reply them.

You might not know whether the mail is from spammer, but for sure, if the mail was sent by a stranger, do not click any link in the mail, and do not reply them, because this will add the spammers' credibility on the existence of you.

Do not forward e-mails from strangers to your friends and family.

Familiar with kind of sentence "Please send this mail to 30 people and your love one will appear in 5 days"? This is the best way for spammer to harvest e-mail addresses.

Do not use your e-mail address as your name in chat rooms.

This will be the convenient way for the spammers to get your e-mail address easily.

Do:

Do make your e-mail address be more complicated.

For example, "emay1988@hotmail.com" will obviously tell the spammers about my identity. Instead, you should make your mail address to be more complicated and not easily be identified such as tem252@hotmail.com.

Do preview messages before click them.

Outlook is a software that provide you a preview mode which allows you to peek the contents before you open it. It is easy, just select the preview pane by clicking the view menu. For more information, you can click this.

Do ensure you have set the privacy setting.

By doing so, you may prevent from receiving marketing from other sites in your AOL and Yahoo profiles. Please do ensure that the webmaster will not sell your email address.

(The solutions are provided by TechSoup Technology Analyst Kevin Lo in November, 2007)


Other recommendations:

Blog Spam

It is a form of spamdexing [1], where spam appears in blogs, especially in the comment box. Spammers will post some random comments on it automatically which may contain some commercial services promotion.

The solution for this is by installing "Askimet" plugin. This benefit is most appropriately applied in Wordpress.

Spam Blocker

According to our research, there are two types of spam blocker that are found to be effective which give excellent results.

1. Cloudmark Desktop

This software is made specially for junk and phishing solution. However, Couldmark Desktop is only available to Outlook, Outlook Express and Mozilla Thunderbird on windows. [2] One of the real strength of Cloudmark is that it will never delete the genuine e-mail by classifying it as a spam. According to Peter Solomon, the user of Couldmark, the system is able to block 50 or more spam messages within a minute. [3]

2. MailWasher

MailWasher is a spam filter software, where it helps you to remove the spam in your e-mail or from your e-mail server before you download it to your computer. That's mean, you download file from e-mail which is free from spamware, and it allows faster speed in downloading.

Sources from:

[1] Spam in blogs (n.d.). Retrieved June 12, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_in_blogs
[2] Richard. G. (2008). Spam Blockers: The Best Products for Home Use. Retrieved June 12, 2009, from http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-antispam.htm
[3] Couldmark Desktop - It just works (n.d.). Retrieved June 12, 2009, from http://www.cloudmark.com/desktop/