Further to my previous posting, here’s another way to keep the spammers out by checking out the links they want you to go to. Sophos, the British virus people, say that their year old URL filtering “continues to prove to be an enormous success”. The filtering basically collects known spam sites and bans any email which… Read More »
America’s new anti-spam CAN-SPAM Act is a great way to stop spam, so long as the spammer is legit. The problem is, most spammers aren’t. Mass.-based software company Ipswitch Inc. estimate that more than two-thirds of all spam is deceptive, meaning that spammers disguise the links to their website “behind unrelated graphics and pictures, or… Read More »
I like this idea from a Slashdot poster: Eliminate most viruses by zipping everything. It works (I think) like this: Most viruses arrive as an attachment to an email. These are called executables in that if you click on them, something happens. (As opposed to a file attachment such as a Word document, or a… Read More »
We can relax: Boffins are now grappling with spam. Nature reports that P. Oscar Boykin and Vwani Roychowdhury of the University of California, Los Angeles, have come up with a way to tackle at least half the emails we get, namely those we get from friends, colleagues, and anyone else either we know or the… Read More »
What to put in the Subject field these days to avoid spam filters? Clive of collision detection (who, incidentally, wrote a first class piece about European virus writers for the NYT) points out that the spam “battle has now claimed its first linguistic casualty. It occurred to me yesterday that you can no longer send… Read More »