Chapter 11: The Dark Side of Spam

Overview

Give any way of communicating time to become popular, and someone will find a way to abuse it for monetary gain. It started with traditional junk mail in the form of those unsolicited flyers, pamphlets, and letters that have no doubt found their way into your postal mailbox. Next came the telemarketers, taking advantage of your personal phone number to pitch you carpet cleaning and lawn care service - after you've just sat down to dinner, of course. The rise of the fax machine brought with it printouts for everything under the sun, and then along came e-mail - is it really any surprise that your inbox is overloaded with so many "spectacular" offers?

Hate it as everyone may, junk e-mail - commonly referred to as spam, but also called unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE) - isn't going away any time soon. Quite simply, it costs next to nothing to send a spam e-mail message to millions of users, and if all those messages result in even one or two sales, its mission is accomplished in the eyes of the sender (lovingly referred to as the spammer). You may have a hard time believing that anyone would consider purchasing something advertised in a spam message, but it happens all the time. One spammer, convicted in the United States, is purported to have made in excess of $24 million hawking various products during a six-year period. In other words, as long as there's money to be made from spam, spam will continue to find its way into your e-mail inbox.

Traditional spam messages that try to sell a product or service are really little more than an annoyance - certainly a big annoyance if you receive hundreds of these messages per day, but still relatively harmless. Unfortunately, the very nature of spam has undergone a marked shift in the past couple of years, to the point where junk mail can represent a real and serious threat to you and your computer. At the more harmless end of the spectrum, opening a spam e-mail message can alert the sender that your address is valid, resulting in even more spam. On the more dangerous end are messages that include viruses, those that try to fool you into giving away sensitive personal details, and even ones that attempt to scam you out of money. Ultimately, even a seemingly harmless e-mail message from someone you know can be very bad news.

In this chapter, you learn more about how spam finds its way into your e-mail inbox, and different techniques that you can use to minimize your exposure to these pesky messages. Let the battle begin!