Varied Venues of Spam

Outside of the more obvious and widespread e-mail based spam, there are other venues in which spammers attempt to convey their messages.

One popular spamming medium is instant messaging services, such as MSN Messenger, ICQ, and Yahoo Instant Messenger. Most sites that offer instant messaging services have public listings of users, called user directories, where one can search for people to chat with based on a number of different criterion, such as age range, geographic location, and gender. Unfortunately, this information is also be used by advertisers for demographic targeting purposes, which enables them to collect specific information about people, including their messenger username. All they need to do then is sign into their own IM service and send messages. Most messenger spammers have scriptable software that gives them the ability to send spam to millions of usernames at one time.

Another area that is vulnerable to spammers is discussion forums. In this situation, the spammer is one who simply posts repetitive messages over and over again, without any purpose of contributing to the topic being discussed.

In conjunction with posting off-topic messages, the spammer utilizes the ability afforded by the forum software to create a signature line that shows up at the end of each of their posts. So while they may not actually spam something in the post itself, they may hope to gain view to their signature line that does contain a link to elsewhere.

One relatively new, and significantly costly type of spam is cell phone text messaging. Due to the fees associated with the receipt of text messages, this can easily cause a financial burden to the cell phone owner.

Guestbook, wiki, and blog spam are also on the rise. In this scenario, a person gets their messages out by leaving irrelevent commentary on people's personal websites, especially if they feel that their message will get alot of traffic. This exploit is due to blog owners allowing their visitors to leave comments on blog entries made.

Spam Videos

Filtering Spam News

Sendio Announces Addition of Access Bank to Growing List of Financial Services Clients (Business Wire via Yahoo! Finance)

NEWPORT BEACH, Calif.----Sendio, Inc., developer of the only email system protection solution to utilize self-managing dynamic white lists which totally eliminate email attacks and abuse, today announced Access Bank, Nigeria’s seventh largest bank by assets, with shareholder funds in excess of $1.6 billion, is the latest financial services organization to adopt Sendio email system protection.

Commentary: Businesses should consider controlling employees' Internet use (Reno Gazette-Journal)

Most businesses these days rely heavily on their connection to the Internet.

E-Mail Management FAQ (WGAL 8 Susquehanna Valley)

Q: How do I unsubscribe? A: 1. Go to the user management page . 2. Enter in the main e-mail address you used to subscribe. 3. On the next page, check or uncheck the boxes next to any alert or email you want to unsubscribe from. 4. Hit submit.

Are Portable Email Addresses Possible? (CircleID)

News reports say that the Israeli government is close to passing a law that requires portable e-mail addresses, similar to portable phone numbers. Number portability has been a success, making it much easier to switch from one provider to another, and address portability might ease switching among ISPs. But e-mail is not phone calls. Is it even possible?

Microsoft to shut down more spam botnets with court orders (TechWorld)

But critics say Waledac shut down has not stopped spam deluge Microsoft has several other botnets in its crosshairs, and believes it can use the same legal tactic against them that it deployed last week to strike at the Waledac botnet's command-and-control centres.