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What is Spam and How to Prevent It?

Obviously, if you use any kind of email accounts or an online messaging system you might not be a stranger to what a spam is. However, the definition of spam can be a little deeper than what the average internet user thinks. With that being said, let’s look at what is spam, where does it come from, and why you receive them, and why someone can even use your email account, website, hosting account or server to send them to other people?

Generally, a spam email is also known as junk email or unsolicited bulk email (UBE), is a subset of electronic spam involving nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients by email. These emails are a form of commercial advertising which an advertiser choose to use because it’s easy, quick and cheap. It should also be noted that spam advertising is an unprofessional way of email marketing.

Often, spammers collect recipient addresses from public sources, use software, programs or scripts to collect addresses from internet databases, and use dictionaries to make automated guesses at common usernames with a given domain name to automatically create random email addresses in order to send marketing emails to.

As spamming is becoming a huge internet problem, this is being addressed legally in several countries, and legislated in many countries as an unlawful activity. Spammers usually hide or use proxy (anonymously, protect their  identities and IP address) to prevent people, authorities, service provider regulations, and anti-spammer lists used by anti-spam software from detecting the origin and type of the emails.

It’s believed that the New gTLD program of registration for new generic top-level domains designated for certain types of communities and organizations or businesses has increased spams, cybercrimes and illegitimate internet and email marketing. Cybercriminals either register domains to spread spam mass mailings, hacked existing sites to place spam pages, or used these and other web resources in chains that redirect users to unwanted spam sites. It’s also believed that more than 95% of email messages sent worldwide is to be spam.

SPAM AND VIRUSES

Simply, spam is sent from servers or computers infected by computer viruses. These malicious programs spread quickly and generate enormous amounts of spam pretending to be sent from legitimate addresses. It’s very important for all computer, hosting account/ service, server and email account owners to install and maintain anti-virus and security programs to avoid having their computer, hosting account and server infected and possibly become a source of spam without them being aware of that.

CONSEQUENCES OF SPAM

Unfortunately, whether you are aware of your origin or the spam or not, or you’re the one sending the spam or not, sendin spam from your email account or server has some serious negative effects. Many email account and hosting/ server owners and users have been affected by falsified messages claiming to be from them.

When hijackers are sending spam via your email account, hosting or server, your email addresses, domain name and IP addresses can be blacklisted. When this happens usually when you send email the end recipients don’t receive it. And since spammers send unimaginable number of emails out to internet and email users, this could shut down your email relay, hosting account or server.

WHAT CAN YOU DO TO PREVENT SPAM

Our hosting account and servers are equiped with free and paid services to secure your email account, hosting and server in order to prevent spam. Please make sure you activate and use them. Spam Assassin™ with email filters are a great place to start from. The open-source SpamAssassin is free and the #1 Open Source anti-spam platform giving system administrators a filter to classify email and block spam (unsolicited bulk email). It uses a robust scoring framework and plug-ins to integrate a wide range of advanced heuristic and statistical analysis tests on email headers and body text including text analysis, Bayesian filtering, DNS blocklists, and collaborative filtering databases. SpamAssassin is a project of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).

You also use external programs and services such as SiteLock to protect your email accounts, hosting/ server, IP addresses and websites. SiteLock also improves SEO and reduce bandwidth and server use with SiteLock’s Global Content Delivery Network (CDN); ensure a consistent and speedy consumer experience, protect websites from all types of DDoS attacks with auto-detection and triggering, and fewer than 0.01% false positives, secures websites from automated and human targeted attacks, prevent scrapers, block backdoor access and sort out bot traffic, protects from malware and identify vulnerabilities with daily malware detection scans, automatic malware removal and expert support.

We always make sure that Spam Protection features, applications are enabled on our shared hosting.  In effect, if you’re using our VPS or dedicated servers, make sure you enable these features as well.

Should you need more information on this subject, search for other topics in the help center, submit a ticket or contact us via phone.

 

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