Facing down the masterminds of unsolicited Internet mail

THE SPAM BUSINESS

Article from Issue 76/2007
Author(s): , Author(s): , Author(s):

Spammers charge real money for their dubious services, and hundreds of advertisers are willing to pay. We’ll show you some innovative techniques for controlling and containing spam, including strategies for slowing down spam bots, keeping spammers from getting your address, and separating spam from legitimate email.

According to the email service provider Postini [1], of some 524 million messages the provider handled worldwide in a period of 24 hours, 88 percent were spam (345 million messages), including 2 million “special offers,” 650,000 get-rich-quick schemes, and 2 million messages with sexual content. Just 46 million legitimate emails actually reached their targets. Despite the best efforts of the experts, the spam glut isn’t going away. Most organizations focus on containing the problem to prevent losses in admin time and user productivity. We’ll show you some of the latest strategies for fighting spam in this month’s cover story. We’ll start by examining some techniques for keeping spammers from getting your address in the first place. Then we’ll show you how you can throw the spammers off your trail with a tarpit. We’ll also review some anti-spam appliances and services, and we’ll describe a custom solution for a user-trainable spam filter that operates from the server side.

Buy this article as PDF

Express-Checkout as PDF
Price $2.95
(incl. VAT)

Buy Linux Magazine

SINGLE ISSUES
Print Issues
Digital Issues
 
SUBSCRIPTIONS
Print Subs
Digisubs
 
TABLET & SMARTPHONE APPS
Get it on Google Play

US / Canada

Get it on Google Play

UK / Australia

Related content

  • Kaspersky Lab: Spammers Do Their Own Advertising

    In its semi-annual spam report, the Russian security experts Kaspersky Lab have concluded the economic crisis has had no bearing on the amount of spam distributed worldwide. However, spammers have had to turn to creating ads for their very own services.

    more »
  • SpamAssassin

    Even if you do not have a mail server of your own, SpamAssassin can help you filter out unsolicited junk mail. This article describes how SpamAssassin collaborates with Evolution and KMail. Thunderbird, on the other hand, has its own simple spam-detection feature.

    more »
  • Bot_Attack

    While going about his normal duties, Linux Magazine author Charly Kühnast was hit with a mean attack. Charly’s separate anti-spam server, which sits in front of his mail server, saved him from the mail storm.

    more »
  • IMAP spam filter

    We’ll show you a custom solution for moving spam to a separate folder and adding new spam signatures to SpamAssassin.

    more »
  • Choosing a Spam Filter

    Spam filters have different modes of operation. Understanding how they work can help you choose which to use.

    more »
comments powered by Disqus
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters

Support Our Work

Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

Learn More

News

Tag Cloud

Administration Community Events Hardware Linux Linux Pro Magazine Mobile Programming Security Software Ubuntu Web Development Windows free software open source