What Is Email Spam?

Republished By Plato

Followers: 0

ransomware Reading Time: 5 minutes

Email spam is not only annoying but also dangerous to users. So, what is email spam? Email spam is nothing but junk email or unsolicited bulk emails sent through the email system.

It refers to the use of an email system to send unsolicited emails especially advertising emails to a group of recipients. Unsolicited emails mean the recipient did not grant permission for receiving those emails.

The use of spam emails has been growing in popularity since the last decade and is a problem faced by most email users. Email IDs of users who receive email spam are usually obtained by spambots (automated software that crawls the internet for email addresses).

Email spam is still a problem even today, and spammers still approach it the spam way. Spam accounts for billions of emails sent every day which makes up 98% of all emails. Spam causes businesses billions of dollars every year.

Even though antivirus software has come a long way, infected PCs, trojans and bots are still the major sources of spam. There are billions of public IPs available for use; each one could have thousands of PCs behind it including potentially infected trojans and bots.

With new computers being infected on a regular basis, even some of the best reputation lists such as the SpamRats list with its 70 million listed IPs can only target a small fraction of those billions of addresses.

In the time it takes for spam filters to analyze the content of the email message, find out the source of the email and then submit the IP for blacklisting, you would have already allowed email spam into your system.

Email spam is also termed as junk email, these are suspicious messages sent in bulk through emails. Most of the email spam messages are commercial in nature. They contain links that look genuine and convincingly familiar however the links leads to phishing websites that hosts malware.

Email Spam

It was first in the early 1990’s the concept of spam emails started. Reports reveal that malware infected network of computers or the botnets are used to send spam emails. Spambots are used by spammers to obtain email addresses of the target victims and send malicious emails to the obtained email list. Though the spammer sends mails to millions of email addresses, only a small number will respond or communicate with the message.

Types of Email Spam

Email spam come in different types. The most common of all is the spam mails that are disguised marketing campaigns for business promotions. It can be promotion of weight loss programs, job offers and even any clothing brand with unbelievable offers.

Spammers use spam mails to perform email frauds. Fraudulent spams come in the form of phishing emails mostly like a formal communication from banks or any other online payment processors. Phishing emails are crafted to direct victims to a fake organization’s website that is malicious while the user ends up sharing all the personal information like login credentials, financial details to spammer who is having access to the malicious website

Best Ways to Prevent Spam Emails

Method #1:

The most common form of spam protection is setting up a filter in front of your mail server. When an email is delivered, it first must pass through the filter before reaching the spam filter. From there (email server), it goes to the client server. In this stage, the email server knows nothing about the source of the spam and the filter doesn’t know what the client wants to do with the spam. It means that the filter must be one size fits for all.

Method #2:

Another common form of spam protection is by setting up the filter directly in the mail server. It requires a much bigger pipeline to the mail server causing more bandwidth, and there are other problems. Spam emails cannot be bounced back in this method.

Using a spam content filter can be very expensive, as the filter must accept the whole message and then apply a certain set of rules to the content that continuously changes. Relying entirely on spam filters is a constant game between the filtering software and the spammer. You set up a rule until a spammer finds a way around it. Before your spam filtering rules can be updated to accommodate the new strategy, you have already allowed lots of email spam onto your server. It’s a constant game, and it requires a better solution.

There should be a faster, more reliable solution for email spam. This is where the Comodo Dome Antispam solution comes into play. Before the spam email even enters your system, the Comodo Dome Antispam solution can detect whether or not it is coming from a legitimate configured mail server.

Comodo Dome Antispam can detect when the trojan is masquerading as a real mail server. It means better zero-day protection, no backscatter or reduced overhead costs.

Comodo Dome Antispam is the only enterprise anti-spam solution that has containment technology built-in. It uses advanced spam filters, and content analysis engines to identify and prevent unsolicited emails from entering your network.

How to Stop Spam Email With Comodo Dome Antispam

Comodo Dome Antispam delivers a combination of spam filters, content analysis engines, phishing prevention techniques to deny unsolicited emails from entering the users’ network. Dome Antispam equips to fight against the latest unknown and zero-day threats with its advanced level of protection mechanism it offers.

Comodo Antispam solution is developed to be compatible with all the Mail Transfer Agents. It is also equipped to integrate with already available email structures and is scalable to all types of users. Comodo Dome is robust and efficient in providing the filtering algorithms to provide accuracy rates through content classification and identification of spam

It provides the following capabilities to equip users to filter out the spam much effectively

Security and usability: Users, though unsure if the emails are genuine or suspicious, still have the privilege to open the attachments without having the risk of infection from malicious files.

Granular control: It give a centralized console to manage and provide a granular level of control through group-based email policies and therefore enhanced security.

Flexible and Easy deployment: It is made available in Cloud, Dedicated On-premises and Hosted Cloud.

Comodo Dome Antispam can detect when the trojan is masquerading as a real mail server. It means better zero-day protection, no backscatter or reduced overhead costs.

If you are in search of a good anti-spam solution, look no further and get Comodo Dome Anti-spam today!

Premium Internet Security

Free Website Monitoring