What is Email Spoofing?

Email spoofing or ‘spoofing’ is email sent from someone pretending to be someone else is known as spoofing. Spoofing may take place in a number of ways. Common to all of them is that the actual sender’s name and the origin of the message are concealed or masked from the recipient. Many, if not most, instances of email fraud use at least minimal spoofing, as most frauds are clearly criminal acts. Criminals typically try to avoid easy traceability.

By:Jer

Four Proven Tips To Fight Spam Emails

Spam emails are junk emails or bulk emails sent to numerous recipients. Spam emails are usually aimed to advertise something, scam, or sending virus and trojan.

If we do not take precaution against spam, we will always receive it even though we’ve changed our email address, it will keep coming to our inbox. Therefore, in order to block the spam emails, these are four proven tips that will block the spam emails completely.

1. Whitelist

Keep a whitelist. Whitelist is a list of everyone who can send emails to you and you can receive the emails if the person on your whitelist is the one who sent it. However, by using the whitelist, you’re having a problem receiving newsletter or ezine if you forgot to add their email addresses. This is the problem of using whitelist. But, by using it, you will not receive anymore spam emails. Any emails that are not in your whitelist, will be sent to spam inbox.

2. Blacklist

Blacklist all the senders that you don’t know or email addresses from previous spam emails. It will prevent the spammer to send more spam using the same email address to your inbox. A blacklist can blocks several email addresses and it will blocks any blacklist emails from entering your inbox.

3. Spam Blocker

If you’re serious in fighting spam, consider investing in spam blocker software. Spam blocker software will filter the emails that you receive and distinguish it between spam or normal emails. There are many spam blocker software and you can search it on Google.

4. Report The Spam Emails

This is one of the methods that I like. If you receive more spam emails, report it to spamcop.net. Create an account with them and send your spam report to them. They will send the report to the hosting company of the email used by the spammer and the hosting company will do what is necessary to stop the spammer from sending anymore spam.

Spam is one of the threats that we faced when we’re using the Internet. Even though most of the spam emails are not harmful, it is still a waste of time deleting and is annoying. Some spams are harmful to our computer because the spammer will send viruses or trojan as attachment and if we’re not careful enough, we will become their next victim.

About the Author:

Azwan Asmat is the author of Chuang Computer Tips http://chuangcomputer.blogspot.com .

A Word About ‘Opt-in’ Offers

You receive an unsolicited offer by e-mail for 100% Business Opportunity Seeker Addresses. The word opt-in is all over the offer. What do you do?

If you have any sense, you’ll report it. If you have been SPAMMED with an offer for opt-in, you can be absolutely sure that the addresses on that list are harvested without the permission of the targets. In other words, if you spend money on that list and send your offers to it, YOU will lose your accounts for spamming.

Right now, some of the most persistent spammers who lie about the origination of their lists are Cashfromhome.com, Consumer Connections, Email King, Pavilion Advertising Services… well, actually, you can pretty much assume just about anything you receive unsolicited in your own e-mail is bogus.

A good rules of thumb is to NEVER e-mail anybody with an offer unless you can PERSONALLY verify that they requested your information.

By Jer

What About Targeted Advertising?

However, the real issue is not one of content. Even if all commercial e-mail was truly targeted and all e-mail marketers sold legitimate products, we would still be inundated with countless numbers of unsolicited advertisements. Right now, most ISPs have strong policies prohibiting their customers from spamming, and when they receive the hundreds (or thousands) of abuse reports that result from each incidence, they will either warn the spammer or immediately cancel his account. Imagine what would be happening right now if this were not so and UCE was an acceptable form of internet marketing.

If only 5,000 companies (a miniscule percentage of what’s out there) decided to try this form of free advertising and send out only 100,000 pieces a week, there would be 500 MILLION pieces of junk mail being pushed through the system each week. How long would you be prepared to wait to load 500+ pieces of spam into your mail reader every time you logged on? How many pieces of valid e-mail from friends and relatives would you be willing to bounce due to your mailbox being filled to capacity with junk mail? Will the request of just press delete be asking too much when you are doing it 1,000 times a day?

Oh, but if it was targeted e-mail from legitimate companies, you wouldn’t get that much of it, right? Well, let’s see. Do you use toothpaste, read books, wear clothes, write with pens, get colds, have pets, drive a car, use a telephone, watch TV, use a printer, play games, have children, shave, cook, eat food, go on vacations, listen to music, wash your hair, do laundry… are you starting to get the picture?

By Jeremy

Is It Ever OK To Advertise By E-Mail?

The only acceptable form of e-mail advertising is called opt-in. This is when you SPECIFICALLY REQUEST that a company put your name on their mailing list. And this is only acceptable if there is a good confirmation process to determine that YOU – and not somebody trying to get either you or the marketing company in hot water – are the one who actually submitted your e-mail address. Right now it’s very common for morons to submit other people’s e-mail addresses to opt-in lists either as a joke or an act of revenge.

Another important requirement for an opt-in list is that the confirmation process require a REPLY TO CONFIRM, with a specific code imbedded in the subject line for security purposes – again, to ensure that the reply is from YOU. A no reply should automatically remove your name from the list. Why is this important? Think about it – how many times have you been spammed with the instructions to reply to remove your address? Almost every spam? This is a traditional spammer trick to harvest live, active e-mail addresses to sell to other spammers. Therefore, nobody will ever trust an opt-in list that requires a reply to remove.

Many e-mail marketers are pushing the idea of opt-out. The way this supposedly works is that an advertiser sends you UCE with instructions for removal of your name from their mailing list. Some of them even try to lend legitimacy to this method by requiring that the spam be labeled as Advertisement, assumedly to make it easier for you to determine whether or not you want to read it. This is UNACCEPTABLE for two main reasons:

Many people are already receiving upwards of 50+ pieces of spam per day, all from different advertisers. As noted above, if Unsolicited Commercial E-mail became an approved method of marketing, these numbers would skyrocket. The victimized netizen would be spending ever-increasing amounts of time requesting to be removed from mailing lists that he never wanted to be on in the first place.
It’s been attempted before and proven unworkable. If you request to be removed from a mailing list, you are depending on the moral standards of the spammer to honor your request. So far the vast majority of spammers have shown themselves to be completely devoid of any ethics. Anybody who has requested removal from a mailing list can attest to this – a removal request normally INCREASES the amount of spam received because it has historically been used as a validation of the requestor’s e-mail address. Not only will the spammer not honor your request, but he will then have yet another “fresh” e-mail address to sell to other spammers.