1. Jujuan RomeRome1<br />Professor Stephanie Quinn<br />English 2950<br />Final Research Paper<br />Introduction:<br />It is a new day at the office, and workers are getting online to check their electronic mail, only to find that it has been overrun by unsolicited junk mail. This mail, more commonly referred to as spam has been around since the beginning of the Internet, and as the Internet has grown, so has spam .A recent study by Star Internet, based on the typical number of staff spending ten minutes a day checking their mail, indicates that spam costs companies because time is money. This is just one reason why bulk unsolicited or spam e-mail is costly, time consuming, and should be banned. The term spam for unsolicited e-mail is believed to have originated from a Monty Python skit in which the dialogue was drowned out by shouting out the word quot;
spamquot;
.<br />You ever get that email from that unknown address saying that you’ve won something? What about the text message from a 5 digit number telling you that something is on sale? No? Well you’ve had to have seen the ads on the websites you go to that tells you that you have won a million dollars. What about the sexual enhancements ads? Everybody that has ever been on the internet has at least seen one of the above. What to know what it is? Keep reading!<br />Information:<br />Rome2<br />Spam is flooding the internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would otherwise choose not to receive it. In the Cheryl Bowman article “What Is the Meaning of Spam”, she says, “The modern meaning of spam is unsolicited commercial emails sent to thousands of users simultaneously. Most spam is commercial, electronic junk mail or email chain letters. Spam cost senders very little to send and is paid by the recipient or the carrier, not the sender. Email spam targets individual users with direct mail messages.<br />Email spam lists are often created by scanning Usenet postings, stealing internet mail lists and searching the web for addresses. One particular option of email spam is sending spam to mailing lists. Since mailing list limits activity to their subscribers, spammers will use automated tools to subscribe to as many mailing lists as possible. They then use the mailing lists as a direct target for their attacks. <br />Never reply to spam, this let spammers verify that this is a known good address. Be careful where you place an email address on the web. A lot of spam comes from us putting our emails on websites that we expect newsletters from. Something you can do if you dislike getting all that spam is to create a second email address. You should use your personal address for all personal items, and only use the second email on the web for sites that you think you could get spam from. <br />Rome3<br />In addition to wasting people’s time with unwanted email, spam also eats up a lot of network bandwidth. Network Bandwidth is a measure of available or consumed data communication resources expressed bit/s or multiples of it. There are many software developers who have taken it upon themselves to fight spam with a variety of techniques but because the internet is public, there is really little that can be done to prevent spam or junk mail. However, some online services have instituted policies to prevent spammers from sending spam to the subscribers. With this in mind there’s an antispam organization out there that’s fighting for you. CAUCE, the Coalition against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail, is an all-volunteer global entity. They put all their efforts into getting legislation passed that would help stop and penalize spam.<br />Although spam is a problem for businesses, it is certainly not limited to them. A large amount of spam mail is targeted at anyone who has an e-mail address, and many adults are therefore concerned at some of the content that is sometimes received with these inconvenient messages. Some spam messages may contain explicit content, such as subject headers that display sexually explicit words and phrases that may be unsuitable for children who have access to the Internet. You should install a parental control on your computer but on the other hand, <br />Even though spam can contain some sexually explicit material, there are generally twelve spam scams that seem to be popular. Many spam messages may contain promises of business <br />Rome4<br />Opportunities, making money scams, work-at-home schemes, health and diet scams, easy money, getting free merchandise, chain letters, getting free merchandise. Investment opportunities, cable scrambler kits, guaranteed loans or credit with easy terms, credit repair, and vacation prize promotions. You should always use junk mail filters and refrain from opening or responding to unknown and unfamiliar emails. Not only could they be just spam but they may also contain a virus which may be a bigger threat to your computer and cost more money in the long run.<br />According to Dorothy Frank, “A quick test to see if your email is in the spam database is to attend Google and type in your email address. If any results come up then your address is in the public domain and spammers have open access to it.” You can prevent opening up spam messages through your email or commercial by understanding the anatomy of it. There are about six key things that you can observe right before you decide to click on an email or advertisement. Look at the sender. Usually the name would be in capital letters and would be a name that is unbelievable and looks as if the computer just made it up. Looking at the sender can be used to spot spam. You can observe the e-mail address. It would clearly look fake but if you don’t catch on at first you can look at the domain after the @ sign and Google about it and see if its offers are related to the email. <br />The subject also can cause a red flag with its bad spelling. It avoids mentioning what the message is actually about which might help it sneak past some spam filters. The body of the <br />Rome5 message is actually an image rather than text. Again this is another trick to defeat spam filters. Finally there is the extra text. Spammers regularly use large lumps of text to try to convince filtering systems that a message is legitimate. What should be noted is that nowhere in this mail does the text actually mention what the message is about. The only mention what it is offering for sale is in the image.<br />When you hear the word spam, your immediate thoughts go to the more well-known and common form of spam: e-mail spam. However, other types of spam are found in a variety of internet communication mediums such as instant messaging, discussion boards, mobile phones with text messaging, newsgroups, internet telephony, blogs — basically any device or client that provides a means for communications.<br />Conclusion:<br />At the end of the day, you probably won’t be able to stop spam. What you will be able to do is contain and prevent it from getting special information. Taking all precautions will do this. Make sure to have a good security/virus protector. Avast and AVG are my top recommendations. Try to put the least personal information on the internet as you can. Internet shopping is okay, just make sure that the site you are shopping on is guaranteed site. Guaranteed meaning confirmed or referred. Most sites have comments that you can read, read those. Other than that, there’s not much you can do. You don’t have to worry that much because according to Mike Grunch, “It is extremely important to pay attention to internet security but on the other hand, there is no reason to get paranoid”. We all should be alright.<br />