Spam is one of the first concepts that a newbie may encounter. In order to answer the question of what spam is, to understand the causes of its occurrence and how to deal with it, and this article was written.
Spam - the interpretation of the term and the essence of the problem
The very concept of “spam” arose as an analogue of the once-existing obsessive canned advertisement common in America. This fact was reflected in the work of Monty Python - the English comedian group. When Internet technologies began to develop, various advertising letters began to be called spam, which were sent to an electronic mailbox without the consent of the addressee. To more correctly determine what spam is, we’ll name several types of it. For example, it can be messages that advertise legal or illegal products, anti-advertising, fraudulent emails aimed at tricking people into money or stealing passwords for a person’s bank credit card. But spam can only be called mailings for which the person did not give permission.
If the user of the site after registration leaves an email address on him, thus, he gives consent to receive information from this site. Such messages will not be considered spam, as the person himself gave permission to them.
To understand what spam is, just give an example. A spammer can illegally seize the email addresses of users and do mass mailing of advertising messages. This will be considered spam.
Spam can become a real problem for communication and networking. So, you may receive a message that says about an attempt to hack your page on social networks and a link to fix the problem. It is best to avoid the temptation to take advantage of it. Otherwise, a situation will arise when spam messages will be sent to all your contacts on your behalf. Spam can carry viruses. The banner program is even more dangerous. She is able to block Windows. And then only reinstalling the operating system will save the situation. When identifying malicious spam, what it is, it is extremely important to know in order to know the enemy “in person”. So, it can be classified as spam advertising links posted on forums, flyers , etc. As a rule, spam must be removed immediately. The following signs characteristic of spam can be distinguished:
links to sites advertising services in a particular field,
non-neutral link headers,
Distribution of links on spam articles and on user pages.
Ways to Combat Spam
To avoid spam, it is better to have two e-mail boxes. You can specify one of the addresses when visiting forums, sites. You can not check it. Most likely, it will be filled with spam. And use the second address for correspondence. You can never respond to a request to send an SMS message. For example, to unlock your page or to enter a specific site. It is quite possible that you will encounter scammers who thus receive money from deceived Internet users, or run a virus. A malicious program that enters a user's computer overwrites the host file located on your operating system. He is responsible for the IP address. The file must be identified and destroyed.
There are a lot of ways to protect against spam. However, none of them gives a guarantee that from now on spam will not bother you. Nevertheless, knowing what spam is, you can fight it. There are special spam bots that can identify email addresses on the network. In order not to get into the spammer’s database, they use javascript code to mask their address. If your browser does not support javascript, you should use the tag. Other options, such as replacing the @ symbol with the word dog, are also suitable as anti-spam. Characters can be separated by spaces.
Communicating in social networks, walking through sites, you need to know what spam is on the Internet in order to avoid the loss of data, money and save your nerves.