Concept in Definition ABC

How much email do you get every day? And how much of this do you think is useful? And how much is advertising? And how much corresponds to lists of distribution -newsletters- in which you have never enrolled of your own free will? Welcome to the complex world of Spam.

We understand Spam as those messages that we never request, most of which are for advertising purposes.

The practice of Spam is common today, but its beginnings are lost on Usenet, one of the pre-eminent networks.Internet and that gave way to the current Internet. We can even find historians who trace the history of Spam to the telegrams of the 19th century.

However, a key date in the particular history of Spam is March 5, 1994, when a American law firm specializing in residency cases, sent 10,000 Usenet mailboxes a message offering their services.

It was what became known as the "Green Card Spam", by the name of the residence card in the US, and can be considered, regardless of previous history, as the first modern Spam.

The term Spam has its origin in a sketch satirical TV show Monty Python's Flying Circus, of the homonymous group.

The denomination was also not new, and the sketch referred to a canned meat called Spam, which was precisely what people laughed at. Monty Python.

Since its inception, the practice of Spam has grown exponentially and, today, in many cases most of the messages that enter our mailboxes correspond to this category.

Once the introduction historical, it is easy for us to wonder how it is possible that our email address is the target of so-called spammers, which are the ones who send spam messages.

The spammers obtain our email addresses through database theft (purchase of smuggling databases), the extrapolation of addresses from test and trial, or agreements with holders of address databases, also from legal form

The extrapolation of the directions is the method more difficult as it requires creating a series of addresses and checking them. Typically, this is done with a dictionary, combining words, names, and numbers, and matching them to commonly used servers such as @ gmail.com, @ outlook.com, or @ yahoo.com.

Theft or negotiation to gain control of databases of e-mail addresses is a more costly system in economic terms, but more direct.

Every time you register for an online service with your email address, it becomes part of the database of the company or person that offers said service. From there, and by various means, it can end up in the hands of third parties, either in a consensual or non-consensual way.

For example, a employee of a company, for an extra profit, it can sell its customers' data on the black market. On the other hand, an attack by cybercriminals can end, among other consequences, with customer data in the hands of third parties.

What can we do to defend ourselves in these cases?

Something very common is to have one or more email addresses that we will use to subscribe to online services that we use sporadically, while another solution goes through the filters anti-spam.

The first is very effective, but it does not eliminate the need for the second. Having one or more secondary addresses allows us to abandon them as they are no longer make necessary, since many times we will only need to use certain services in a temporary.

However, and since any address will end up receiving Spam, we will also need an anti-spam filter for our main email account or accounts.

An anti-spam filter consists of a tool that detects and filters messages that it considers to be Spam to a specific folder.

This detection can be carried out by various methods. For example, the system can buy all the messages that arrive, detecting those that are the same and sent en masse.

Also they can have "registered" the addresses that use the spammers, as well as certain texts that they use in their messages.

Be that as it may, spam is a serious problem but one that can be fought.

Topics in Spam