According to a recent study by McAfee Inc.,
"spam e-mail is not only a nuisance, but is damaging to the environment
and substantially contributes to green house gas (GHG) emissions."
About 33 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) or energy is used yearly around
the globe to send, handle and filter out spam emails. This wastage of electricity can power "2.4
million homes" and the GHG emissions are equal to "3.1 million
passenger cars using 2 billion gallons of gasoline." Just imagine the
positive impact caused by taking McColo

offline last year. About 62 trillion spam messages are transmitted
every year and McColo going down provided the same benefit obtained by
removing 2.2 million cars off the road for one day.

"Some important findings from the study include:

• The average GHG emission associated with a single spam message is 0.3
  grams of CO2. That's like driving three feet (one meter); but when
  multiplied by the yearly volume of spam, it is equivalent to driving
  around the earth 1.6 million times.

• 
  Much of the energy consumption associated with spam (nearly 80 percent)
  comes from end-users deleting spam and searching for legitimate e-mail
  (false positives). Spam filtering accounts for just 16 percent of
  spam-related energy use.
• 
  Spam filtering saves 135 TWh of electricity per year. That is
  equivalent to taking 13 million cars off the road.
• 
  If every inbox were protected by a state-of-the-art spam filter,
  organizations and individuals could reduce today’s spam energy by 75
  percent or 25 TWh per year, the equivalent of taking 2.3 million
  cars off the road.
• 
  Countries with greater Internet connectivity and users, such as the
  United States and India, tended to have proportionately higher
  emissions per e-mail users. The United States for example, had
  emissions that were 38 times that of Spain.
• 
  While Canada, China, Brazil, India, the United States and the United
  Kingdom had similar energy use for spam by country, Australia, Germany,
  France, Mexico and Spain tended to come in about 10 percent lower.
  Spain came in at the lowest, with both the smallest amount of e-mail
  that was received as spam and the smallest amount of energy use for
  spam per e-mail user."

Image courtesy of www.topnews.in

What is spam? How do we define spam? If you sign up for a free account at a store's website with the hopes of winning a couple of tickets to the Super Bowl and receive a newsletter from them, does it still constitute as spam? When it comes to newsletters, their legitimacy is a tossup depending upon the end-user's preferences. Certain users want their newsletters to pass through and others do not. Fortunately, the Interceptor caters to both parties thereby clearing up the IT administrator's proverbial plate. An end-user's involvement in this matter is strictly limited to a few drag-and-drop moves which take no longer than five seconds. And then there is email which can be undeniably categorized as spam.

Messages that offer (read: poorly advertise) "growth" pills, real estate deals, a ton of cash and other gimmicks can be safely categorized as spam. According to Princeton University's WordNet, spam is "unwanted e-mail (usually of a commercial nature sent out in bulk)" with special emphasis on the word commercial. (Unsolicited) bulk email is annoying. It's even more annoying than bulk snail mail. Most bulk email can be classified as spam. Bulk spam feeds off of people's technical competence (or the lack thereof) by tricking them into clicking on unsafe links to buy various unmentionables. The first step towards stopping the spread of spam is to inform end-users to never click on any spam email links. If spammers notice low hit rates from their target(s), they will look elsewhere.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), on Tuesday, shutdown one of the largest spam operations in the world which accounted for up to a third of all major spam around the world. The masterminds behind this operation were two individuals - an American and a New Zealander. Their method involved sending out billions of e-mail messages offering prescription drugs, male enhancement drugs and weight loss pills at dirt cheap prices. According to Steve Baker, Director of the FTC's Midwest Region, "Servers in China hosted the Web sites and the drugs were shipped from India, while operatives in Cyprus and the former Soviet republic of Georgia processed credit card information."

The gang violated three rules outlined in the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.

1. The origin of the e-mail was masked by spoofing the header.
2. The e-mail did not include an "opt-out" link.
3. The e-mail did not include a physical postal address for the organization.

In addition to the above, the operation did not ask the buyers for proof of a doctor's prescription and the shipment did not have doctor's/dosage information. "A federal judge in Chicago issued a temporary injunction to halt the operation and also froze its assets. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is investigating and those involved could also face criminal charges", Baker said.

The bottom line? Delete ALL e-mails that offer prescription drugs at low prices while offering male enhancement and weight loss pills in the same e-mail.

After having a great year snaring spam, our focus now is to provide the same efficiency and effectiveness of the enterprise class Interceptor to small and medium sized businesses (SMBs). Entering the new market compelled us to concentrate on making the appliance easily affordable for SMBs without actually compromising the effectiveness of the device. Having said that, entering the BizTech Expo was a way for us to show SMBs that we can fix their spam issues for way cheaper than what our competitors cost combined with higher capture rates. We're glad to have shared our business information with Business Report

You gotta admit. Spammers are unequivocally getting more creative with their methods. The latest spam is being transmitted through an MP3 file. The file can be opened with any audio player and usually contains a persuasive bit (usually in a "synthesized female voice") encouraging people to purchase a certain stock. According to ZDNet UK, "The spam contains no text or subject header while the attached MP3
files, according to security firm Sophos, are named after popular
artists such as Elvis Presley, Fergie or Carrie Underwood." As for now, MP3 spam is not as serious as PDF or image-based spam because of the size of the file itself. MP3 files are larger in size compared to PDFs and images and this causes "extra costs associated with carrying it." Earthtimes announced recently that MP3 spam currently accounts for 7-10% of all global spam. Even though these numbers are not significantly high to cause worldwide concern, the randomness of the filenames combined with the end-user's limited technical knowledge, MP3 spam is bound to cause havoc for a while.

Well, well, well...it looks like spammers are now exploiting YouTube's features to spam the heck out of us. "Just when I thought that I was out they pull me back in." Not really. I just felt like throwing that Michael Corleone line out there. Alright, getting back to the issue at hand, YouTube allows us to view and post various videos on the Internet through a common portal (if you did not already know that, please shoot me an e-mail and I would be more than happy to recommend a few good middle schools to you). Users are allowed to leave comments under each video. From my experience with these comments, they are usually flame wars between adrenaline powered teenagers which I find to be quite entertaining. I just realized that these comments have nothing to do with this article. Note to self: stop taking off on tangents.

According to iTnews, PDF spam is on the fall. Hmm...that sure was a short lived attempt by spammers to increase stock prices. Paul Ducklin of Sophos claims that PDF spam is dying out because it requires more user interaction than regular/conventional spam and is therefore not as successful as its predecessor (oh wait! Regular spam is still around). I think we all agree with him when he says that PDF spam has been around for a while now but in the last couple of months, it has gone from being a rare occurrence to almost replacing the usual (read: monotonous) spam. The failure of PDF spam due to a higher requirement of user interaction is actually a blessing for both sides. Spammers might (most likely) start focusing on releasing new types of spam with as little user interaction as possible. I really don't think there is a much easier way to spam people other than the conventional method but that is no excuse to take this issue lightly. Until we start experiencing a fairly large drop in inbound PDF spam, we assure you that our Software Development Team is constantly working on it.

By the way, BtoBonline.com has an excellent description of what is considered spam (based on the CAN-SPAM Act). I'm sure you won't be disappointed.

I guess I spoke too soon (is that even possible). The spammers are at it again. This time around, it's PDF stock spam. In the past, barely comprehensible text about certain public stock (which happens to be from a company that nobody has ever heard of before) was embedded into an image and sent out to random e-mail addresses. It was lovingly (guaranteed to provide that fuzzy feeling in your belly) called image based spam. Ever since blocking image spam became an easier task than teaching your dog to sit for the Interceptor, spammers have undoubtedly moved on.