Editorial Feature - Email Basics and Spam
|Published:||Nov 26, 2007|
by Nebojsa Djogo of DigiPortal
What is email?
Email is a system or a method of creating, storing as
Editorial Feature - Email Basics and Spam
|Published:||Nov 26, 2007|
by Nebojsa Djogo of DigiPortal
What is email?
Email is a system or a method of creating, storing as well as sending and receiving messages via electronic communication systems.
Basically email is a group of tools and technologies allowing people to communicate over long or short distances. This communication can include various document formats like pictures, sounds, presentations or indeed, any kind of document. As we will see later every email communication is performed using text only even if binary files are sent within an email message.
Did you know that email was used before the Internet was invented?
In early 1960's, people used something called "time sharing systems" (IBM 7094 at MIT in particular). People would dial into this system from a remote terminal. These were capable of running more than one program on a single computer (which was somewhat novel for that time period) and offered a chance for users to send messages from one terminal to another. This was the first form of email, but it was limited to users connected to the same computer.
Ray Tomlinson created the first SNDMSG and READMAIL programs that were the actual beginning of the email we know today. He also invented the use of the at "@" symbol for email addressing. User@host would indicate a specific user on a specific computer system. Today's addressing format follows the same principle.
In the early 1980's, the SENDMAIL program was created for BSD UNIX systems. SENDMAIL is the most commonly used SMTP server on the internet.
What is spam?
You may find many different definitions about what spam actually is. While we all understand the term very well, its definition is sometimes confusing. For example:
"SPAM is unsolicited commercial email"
While it sounds perfectly valid at the first glance, we have to remember that many people do want to receive unsolicited mail. Not all commercial unsolicited mail is spam for all users. One has to pair the user with the message to determine if the message is spam or not.
Therefore SPAM is, in most the simplistic terms, an unwanted message determined by the recipient.
Wikipedia classifies spam as this:
"abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages"
This is actually a pretty good definition. The problem is that often SPAM comes from a KNOWN source that one requested information from before. For example, if you purchased something online you may have willingly subscribed to the update notification.
At some point, some of these companies use your consent to send you promotional material that may or may not be related to your original purchase. They are abusing the electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages and they are doing it indiscriminately to their whole user base regardless of the products or services that user originally purchased from them.
I want email that is related to updates of my product, but I do not want emails related to promoting some other product from the same company. When I receive these one of the messages is spam, the other is not. One is unsolicited, another is not. This is from my own, personal perspective though. You may find that you do want ALL related messages from the same vendor since you may be interested in another of their products.
It is very easy to classify message as spam for yourself, but it is very hard to do the same for someone you never met!
(Incidentally this is the biggest problem with todays anti-spam solutions. Why do I receive spam?
The simple answer to this is because it works! If nobody ever clicked on any ads spammers send out they would not waste the resources or bother to send it. Therefore it must be that some of us, however small the percentage may be, justify the spammers effort to send the message out.
How do spammers know my email address?
Spammers use several tricks to get access to a valid email address lists. Willingly or not, your email address gets transmitted over the internet to various third parties. Some of these sell their email list, get acquired by another company that sells the list or simply publish the list for everyone to see.
Sometimes spammers would use something called "dictionary attack" where they send messages to random email address appending the domain name to words found in a dictionary. A very small percentage of these make it through.
A somewhat recent form of spam and related methods for gaining access to your online accounts is called Phishing. This is a particularly nasty form of spam where spammers deliberately try to fool you into thinking that you received a message from someone you trust and want you to visit a website that lo