Hybrid Filtering of Emails

It is used in the open source programs Spam Assassin and Policyd-weight uses some or all of the various tests for spam, and assigns a numerical score to each test. Each received message is scanned for these patterns and the applicable scores tallied up. If the resulting total is above a fixed value, then the message is rejected as spam or else it is allowed to go through. Since multiple tests are used to analyze each message, the probability that a legitimate message be flagged as spam is very low.

Disabling HTML In E-mail

HTML e-mail is the use of a subset of HTML to provide formatting and semantic markups capabilities in e-mail that are not available with plain text.

Most graphical e-mail clients support HTML e-mail, and many default to it incorporating both a GUI editor for composing HTML e-mails and a rendering engine for displaying received HTML e-mails.

HTML mail allows the sender to properly express quotations (as in inline replying), headings, bulleted lists, subscripts and superscripts, emphasized text, and other visual and typographic cues to improve the aesthetics and readability of the message, as well as semantic information encoded within the message, such as the original author and Message-ID of a quote. Long URLs can be linked to without being broken into multiple pieces, and text is wrapped to fit the width of the user agent’s viewport, instead of uniformly breaking each line at 78 characters as was necessary on older text terminals. It allows in-line inclusion of tables, as well as diagrams or mathematical formulae as images, which are otherwise difficult to convey.

Many mail programs these days incorporate Web browser functionality resulting in the display of HTML, URLs, and images. This easily exposes the user to offensive images in spam. Additionally, spam written in HTML contains web bugs that allow spammers to see that the email address is valid and their message has not been caught in spam filters. JavaScript programs make it difficult for the user to close the advertised page or direct the user to another web page. Spam messages take advantage of these security lapses, using these holes to install spyware. Mail clients, which do not enable HTML in their messages, are pretty much safe and have fewer risks when compared to those who have these functionalities enabled.

Common Problems with eMail Spamming

Cost Shifting: Sending bulk email is very very cheap. With a 28.8 dial up connection and a PC, a spammer can send about thousands of messages per hour. But since every person receiving the spam must bear the cost of dealing with spam the cost incurred by the recipient is greater than the cost incurred by the sender. Though some junk emailers may say, “Just hit the Delete key!” the problem surmounts to more than a person just deleting a couple of mails. In Internet, the word “time” has several meanings and is not just the hourly rate at which people are billed. It may include the load on the processor for the ISP’s servers. ”CPU Time” is very precious since processor performance is a critical issue for the ISPs. If the CPUs are tied up while processing spam, it creates a drag on all the mail in the queue whether they are wanted or not. Filtering cannot be adopted as a strategy for filtering spam by the ISPs since they consume a lot amount of time. Bandwidth costs are a major portion of small and mid size ISPs and is a major reason why ISPs have a low margin of profit. But when an external entity starts to use the ISP’s abndwidth, the ISP has a limited number of choices

• Allowing the customer cope with slower rates
• Bear the cost of increasing bandwidth or
• Raise rates

“Time” also coupled with volume, makes up for some interesting problems. Recent comments made public by AOL stand as a usual point of reference: of the estimated 30 million email messages per day, about 30% were unsolicited commercial email (UCE). With such huge amounts of data, it is a burden for the ISP to store and process that amount of data. Such huge volumes may contribute to the access, speed, and reliabilty problems experienced with a lot of ISPs. If large outfits like Netcom and AOL have trouble coping with the flood, its a pity that small IPS are dying under the crush of spam.

Fraud: Since many of the recipients of the junk email (around 95%) prefer not to receive it, the junk emailers have clever tricks up their sleeve to woo the recipients to open their messages. Tricks such as changing the header in the subject line, may look anything other than an advertisement. Another trick is to relay their mail messages off the mail server of an innocent third party. This tactic has a two-fold effect: both the relay system and the innocent mail victim are flooded with junk messages. Another trick the spammers use is to forge the headers of messages, making it look like as if the message originated elsewhere.

Waste of other’s resources: When a spammer sends out messages it is carried by numerous other systems in its way and there is no justification for the additional load these systems have to bear for the extra payload of the advertisement.

Spammers adopt very fraudulent and tortious techniques to avoid being held responsible in the court. Though large companies may afford to fight these cutting edge lawsuits, small “mom and pop “ ISPs are left to deal the flood of messages on their own.

Ronald Coase and his economic theory: He said that it would be particularly dangerous for a free market when an inefficient business (one that can’t bear the costs of its own activities) distributes its costs among a larger number of victims. It is because when millions of people suffer only a small amount of damage, it becomes more costly for the victims to go out and hire lawyers to recover their damages they suffered. Unless and until that population unites and fights back it will continue to bear those unnecessary and detrimental costs. This is what encourages the spammers to continue their dirty work.

In economic terms, this may be a prescription for disaster. Since when inefficiencies are allowed to continue, the free market would no longer continue at peak efficiency. As learnt in college Microeconomics, the “invisible hands” normally keep the market efficient and balance it, but inefficiencies tip everything out of balance. However, in the context of the Internet, these forces are no longer considered invisible but are actually visible. They can be seen when you have trouble accessing a web site, or when your email takes 3hrs to travel from AOL to Yahoo! Mail, or when a flood of spam crashes your ISP’s server.

CAUCE believes that stealing is stealing be it a penny or a dollar. Remember it is enough to only steal a penny from 4 million people to buy yourself a Mercedes Benz.

Displacement of Normal Email: In the late 1980s when fax machines were used to send messages, the concept of sending advertisements through these machines also came up and it became a difficult task to get the fax you were expecting since you had to go through a lot of junk before you got the right mail. Similarly now the spam that is received today is displacing the actual mail that is meant for us and has led to a tremendous amount of clutter in our inboxes.

What is Email spam?

Email spam commonly known as junk e-mail, is a part of spam that involves nearly similar messages sent to numerous recipients by e-mail. It is commonly known as Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE). Spam definitions usually include the aspects that email is unsolicited and sent in bulk. UCE refers to Unsolicited Commercial Email.

It has exponentially grown from the early 1990s to nearly about 100 billion messages a day. It has caused quite a lot of annoyance, confusion, and frustration among many email users. The total number of spam has leveled off recently with the growth not being exponential. Better filtering techniques have caused a lot of reduction for spam received. Botnets, which are a network of compromised computers, are used to send about 80% of the spam in the world. The cost of the spam is mostly born by the recipient.

Email addresses are collected from chat rooms, newsgroups, websites, and viruses, which harvest user’s address books, and are sold to other spammers. Much of the spam is directed to invalid e-mail addresses. ISPs, which have won legal battles over the spammers, haven’t been able to recover the damages caused to them though. Spam averages 94% of all email sent in the world today.

Most common types of junk mails

To understand the kinds of problems that junk mail leads to, its first important to know what is commonly advertised by the UCE. Recipients and system administrators repost copies of UCE in order to help notify the Internet community the places from which these UCEs originate and the various kinds of the UCEs that are on the Internet. One would find that very few marketers advertise their products via UCE means. In contrast to that, the most commonly seen UCEs advertise

• Chain letters.
• Pyramid schemes such as Multi Level Marketing or MLM.
• Other “Get Wealthy” or “Double Your Money” Schemes.
• Offering free phone sex lines or advertisements for pornographic web sites.
• Software that collects email addresses and sends UCE.
• Bulk email services for sending UCE.
• Stock options for unknown start up companies.
• Ancient health products and remedies.
• Illegal and pirated software (“Warez”).

Types of Electronic Spam

Spam has varying definitions, which varies depending on the source.

• Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE): Sent in large quantities.
• Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE): Used by regulators whose mandate is to monitor commerce information such as the US Federal Trade Commission any fraudulent email message. Any mail message where the actual email id of the sender is forged or those messages that are sent through unauthorized proxies, servers, or botnet.
• 419 Scams: Advance fee fraud such as the 419 scam may be sent by a single person in a developing country. Organized spam gangs in Russia or Eastern Europe may share many features common with other forms of organized crime that may also include revenge killings too.
• Phishing: Many users of the Internet fall prey to scamsters and may enter personal information on fake websites, which are made to appear real like the PayPal website. This activity is known as phishing. Spear phishing is the term given to the mode where in the email appears to have come from a person known to the user. For eg, from his employer.
• Appending: Suppose that a certain marketer has a database containing the names, addresses and telephone numbers of prospective customers, they can have their database matched against a database containing a list of valid email addresses by paying certain amount. But if the database itself contains erroneous information or there is a mismatch in the names of the people then many people would get Unsolicited Commercial Emails (UCE) creating a lot of discontent among the recipients. To protect against this type of fallacies, emails should be sent to users known to have subscribed.
• Image Spam: This is a clever ploy adopted by the spammers in which the text of the image is stored as a JPEG or a GIF image and is displayed in the email. This prevents the spam filters from detecting the message as spam. It is presently used largely to “pump and dump” stocks. Image spams often contain nonsensical data in images that can be read by new technology in few programs but these are not very accurate. Newer techniques include using animated GIF that doesn’t contain clear text in its initial frame or to contort the shapes of the letters in the image.
• Blank Spam: Spam lacking a payload advertisement. The message body as well as the subject line is missing altogether, but these messages qualify as spam since they are sent in bulk and are unsolicited in nature. It could have been intentional or not deliberate. They could have been sent in a directory harvest attack where in the goal of such an attack is to separate invalid addresses from the valid ones. In this case, the spammer may do away with typing the header and the message body. It could also occur when the spammer “forgets” to add the message. Poorly written spam software or shoddy relay servers could also truncate header lines from the server. Certain blank spams often carry a much heavy payload such as a virus or a worm where the message appears blank but is often very malicious. The VBS. Davinia. B. Email Worm is an example of this kind of attack.
• Backscatter Spam: It is one of the side-effects of email spam, viruses and worms, where by the email servers receiving the spam and other mail send bounce messages to an innocent party, since the envelope sender of the original message is forged to show the email address of the innocent victim. Such messages are bulk in nature, are not solicited by the sender, and hence qualify as spam. Systems that generate backscatter are listed in several DNSBLs.

Things Every Traveler Should Do

Being a traveler, you most explore what makes the destination unique. Never ignore the magazines or brochures kept n the table in hotels, they provide good information about the destination. Where to go, how to go, who should we contact in emergency. Always take a note book and a pen along with you. You can pen down your experiences, which will be very interesting to read later. Also, carry a camera or a video recorder to capture your experiences.

Visiting a new town is like a conversation, the more you ask the more you will get to know. Take a professional guide; listen to him with an open mind.

Relish every moment of your first few hours as it is the time when you get an impression towards the destination. See ‘First impression is the best impression.’ Stay away from e-mails or phone calls that remind you of home or office. Think that you are a tourist and make sure you see all the attractions.

Attend any sporting event or a symphony, which does not require you to speak. Check out a bookstore, it is a great way to learn about the locals and their culture. Get into a bus to see the local attractions; you can capture the essence of the local atmosphere.

How To Boost The Appearance Of Your Garden?

We know how the recent housing market has fallen drastically. Some have bought their houses for a good price, in good times, and now they cannot sell it off even for the same price they bought it for.

It is here where people should think of strategies to boost the appearance of their homes to higher values. It is not as hard as many people think of. It is not costlier either. Stimulating the outside appearance of a home can help you to increase its value to a significant level.

If you still require some more inputs, here are a few of them. Provide a good look to your garden with accessories like stylish outdoor furniture. Some of them include swings, table and chairs, decorative planters, window boxes, etc.

The main intention behind this strategy is to show the buyers, how comfortable and pleasurable is living in your house.

Six Tips for Choosing Quality-Typing Games for Kids

Many websites offer typing games for both kids, and adults. You can easily download them from Internet without paying single cent. These games help your kid to learn typing as early as possible. The following are few tips to choose a quality game.

Easy installation process: Go for the game, which is easy to install. Procedures and requirements to install should be less. It is good to go for automated processed games.

User friendly: Games should be user friendly, and easy to understand. Choose easy to understand games because you are choosing the games for your kid. Kids may not continue or interested to play, if the games are not easy to play. They lose interest in learning typing with such games. So be careful while choosing a good user-friendly typing game.

Interactive features: Game should consider interactive features. These features ensure the enjoyable educational experience to learn a skill.

Typing test: Select the game, which has typing test option. This helps in measuring the skill of the kid after few days, to keep the record of accomplishment of speed and accuracy.

Typing lessons: Go for the game that has enough lessons for kids to cover every key of keyboard. There should be balance in using the numeric key pad and main keyboard.

Hand placement training: Check for the game, which has a lesson of placement of fingers on keyword. This ensures to know the position of the each key to become master touch-typing.

Tips for Creating an Effective Blog

The easy and inexpensive access to the blogging has made it a popular online activity. Blogging has many purposes such as expressing views and opinions, earn money, informative, corporate blogging etc. This resulted in the creation of millions of blogs on the internet. Creating an effective blog or making an existing blog effective, can help the blogger to make his blog standout in the millions of blogs.

The following few suggestions can help you in creating a good blog that serve your purpose –

Selecting a suitable blog service:
To get started with, it is essential for a blogger to select a suitable blogging service, to host his blog. There are many blogging services on internet like Blogger.com, WordPress.com, Livejournal.com, TypePad.com, etc. Each of them has unique advantages and some disadvantages as well. A blogger needs to the features of the blogging service, in order to decide which blogging service suits him better.

Building an honest blog personality:
Personality for a blog depends upon many different factors like blog design, layout of the blog, colors used in the blog, blog theme and blog template. A personality should be built honestly based on the capabilities of the blogger. Exaggeration in this issue, can lead to incredibility of the blog.

Quality content for the post:
The phrase, “Content is King”, is much suitable for the blogging. A blog with an informative and quality content is very essential in making the blog an effective one. The content should be genuine as well as original, to create an effective blog.

Interaction with readers:
Blogging has the features of two-way communication. It enables the blogger and the reader to interact with each other. This can be used as an effective tool to make the blog effective. Blogger should allow and moderate readers’ comments by giving a response to them.

Linking the blog:
Providing appropriate links in the blogs can help a reader to find more information on the topic or verify the information. Thus, it helps the blogger to increase credibility of the blog. Blog links also helps in increasing page ranks of the blog.

The above tips can help you to create an effective blog. An effective blog can help the blogger to attain more response and thus become successful.