Spammer Tricks

Spam is the four-letter word associated with the Internet and email. No one wants to receive it, it's time-consuming to comb through, and it can often be offensive to the receiver. There's really only one party who likes spam and those are the ones who send it. It's an inexpensive way to market to the masses, and can be quite effective if done cleverly to the right target audience.

Thus, there is no end in sight for the anti-spam crusade, unless a tried and true way to abolish and punish these spammers indeed is created. In the meantime, we are left to our own defenses, and those of our trusted ISP.

A few common tricks of spammers:

- Misspelled words in subject lines -- these are deliberately misspelled so as to not be detected by your spam filter.

- Headers that have nothing to do with the email's content. Example header: "Got your proposal ", while the email's content is all about Viagra.

- Address munging -- Spammers use a variety of sources to create an email list, and go one step further, splicing addresses together in the hopes of getting a hit. Many of these emails come back to your legitimate email address as undeliverable, while you know you have never written such an email nor sent anything to such an email address. Cape.Com has put filters in place to reduce the occurence of such illegitimate bounce-back error messages.

Spam emails are different from viruses, although the two are certainly not mutually exclusive. You can easily have a spam message infected with a virus, so you need to be doubly alert when opening any attachments.

To learn more about Cape.Com's efforts to reduce spam and our free SpamNabber service, see the Related Links below. In addition, be sure to read Avoiding Unsolicited Junk Email to protect yourself from further spam invasion.

Please note that Cape.Com's free SpamNabber program can be activated and controlled through your Cape.Com Webmail.