from Julia Gulevich

Spam attacks where the text is replaced with images aimed at lightly protected email systems are growing in popularity. With the variety of anti-spam filters that analyze the message content to weed out unsolicited emails, spammers continue to increasingly adopt image spam. Businesses, organizations and everyday computer users might have noted an increase of image-based spam, text e-mails that arrive in your in-box as image files. Image spam can contain a picture of words, a screenshot, a photographic image, or a combination of these. By sending emails that contain no text, only pictures, spammers found that they can fool even the most advanced anti-spam software like SpamAssassin, G-Lock SpamCombat.

Most anti-spam programs detect text-based spam very well, but they totally fail when a spam message has no text to analyze. Thus, the rapid rise of the image spams. These spam messages often include image files that have a screen shot offering the same types of information advertised in more traditional text spam. Image spam can also include unique trackers which work when a recipient opens the message and let the sender know it’s a valid email address, ripe for future mailings. Image spam is probably the best technique that spammers have today to get past the anti-spam filters. Together with the image spam that uses one attached image to deliver its message, the spammers are known to send spam that contains multiple images that act like pieces in a puzzle. The recipient’s email client then reassembles the pieces in the right order and displays them as one image again. In addition to the usual annoyance, image-based spam eats up more bandwidth than regular spam because each image spam message is more than seven times larger than regular spam email – what’s costing users, especially business, money.

The majority of image spam is used in stock scam messages, in which the senders encourage the victims to buy a certain stock to raise its value, then quickly turn around and sell the stock themselves to make a profit.

Nevertheless, anti-spam software and service providers are able to cut down image spam, as well as HTML-based and text spam. The organizations and individual computer users having sophisticated anti-spam filters—those that focus on both the content and origin of the messages—have little to worry about, other than to make sure they’re on the latest version of their vendor’s products and receiving regular updates. They can then analyze and create rules in their software to block it. Many anti-spam software use combinations of techniques, including keywords, blacklists (of offending spam mailers), and something called “honey pots,” in which they have traps set up on the Internet to collect spam messages. There are a number of approaches to protect against image spam. In current versions of Outlook, for example, images are not automatically downloaded into messages unless the user has specified that messages from the source can be trusted. G-Lock SpamCombat allows preview all the messages in a safe mode – no pictures or tracking codes are downloaded nor executed.

from Julia Gulevich


Almost everyone who accesses the Internet and uses e-mail knows about spam. The common definition of spam is e-mail that is unsolicited, undesired by the recipient. Spam is sent out by automated programs to thousands or millions email addresses at a time. In most cases spam emails offer you different services, products (medicines, goods, software programs etc.), and “get rich quickly” plans. You can simply delete them if you receive several unsolicited emails per day. But if you get tens or hundreds spam messages every day, it is a real problem. In order to understand how to deal with spam in your inbox, let’s examine some core questions concerning spam:

Why send spam?

The right answer is to make money. If you have never opened a spam message, you should not think that others don’t do it either. Among thousands or millions people who receive spam you can always find one or several persons who actually purchase services or products the spammers advertise, or join the “get rich” schemes the spammers offer. Of course, they lose and the spammer wins.

How do spammers obtain email addresses?

Spammers use special software programs that search websites, forums, newsgroups and harvest posted email addresses. They can use computer viruses and spyware to steal the email addresses from personal address books. Spammers often purchase lists of email addresses from other spammers, or from some dishonest companies, which do not care about the privacy of their customers’ information.

What danger lies behind spam?

Never buy pharmaceutical drugs such as Valium, Viagra, Cialis, Anatrim, etc. advertised in spam emails. These medications are counterfeited for 99% and can be dangerous.

Viruses – one of the most common computer security threats – can also be spread in spam emails. The worst thing is that viruses slip onto your computer without being noticed. You may think that you will download new free software when you click on a link within a spam message but actually you will get at least one virus infection – most probably a trojan virus. This type of virus can destroy data, steal your personal information such a user name, password, or just download other nasty software onto your computer that will cause more harm. A virus can hide itself in a picture, video or audio file. Certain anti-spam programs such as G-Lock SpamCombat let you preview the messages in a safe mode, i.e. they don’t allow any suspicious pictures to be downloaded nor malicious codes to be executed.

A virus is a nuisance but phishing is a real danger. This type of spam is becoming very popular now. This is a method of tricking consumers with the purpose to worm them out of their personal information such as bank account numbers, passwords, user names, and credit card details. The spammers send a fraudulent email that usually appears to come from financial institutions like Ebay or Paypal saying that there is some trouble with your account and that you need to update it. There is a link within the message that you should follow to update the account details. The web site usually looks like a real company’s web site. But as soon as you start filling the presented form in, the program starts recording your keystrokes and your private details are now disclosed to the spammer.

How to fight spam?

It is prudent to use an anti-spam filter to block annoying, time consuming, and sometimes dangerous spam emails. Anti-spam software checks your incoming emails and immediately moves spam messages into a special trash folder. If you want a good internet security suite that includes a spam blocker, consider BitDefender Professional Plus, Kaspersky Internet Security, F-Secure Internet Security or eTrust Internet Security. For a standalone spam filtering program, look at McAfee Spam Killer, G-Lock SpamCombat, Spam Assassin, Mail Washer Pro or ZapASpam.

from Julia Gulevich


Junk email, spam, is getting worse than ever. Even with an anti-spam filter, some junk emails that show up in the inbox are disgusting, deceptive, and aimed to con you out of your money. In addition to traditional spam emails promoting medication, mortgage, pornography, new ones such as stock scams are growing. The deceptive and unsolicited nature of these e-mails qualifies them as spam.

Stock scams, combined with traditional spam techniques, can cause a significant financial loss to victims of these swindles.

You might have noticed that many spams are touting a particular stock. These touts are sometimes made as part of a Pump and Dump scheme. Pump-and-dump scams are email campaigns which encourage people to invest in a particular company’s stock, in order to quickly inflate its value and enable the spammers to make a fast profit. It is thought that these scams take place unbeknown to the company involved. The purpose of the pump-and-dump stock spam is to quickly and cheaply disperse false information about a company’s stock, along with information obtained from recent press releases, to potential investors. Usually this is a slimly traded stock on a small exchange for only pennies a share.

By implying that recipients of spam emails are in possession of privileged information – such as news of an acquisition before a general announcement – spammers seek to persuade the gullible into purchasing particular stocks. If a significant enough number of easily-led individuals invest in the touted stock, a spammer can ramp up the share price so that existing shareholders can sell their shares at a profit. But when the fraudsters dump their shares, and then stop advertising the stock, the price often falls, and investors ultimately lose their cash.

What to do if you get spammed? How not to become a victim of stock scams?

The first thing you can to protect yourself against stock scams on the Internet and against spam on the whole is to setup an anti-spam filter, which will filter your messages before you receive them into your inbox. Most pump-and-dump spam emails contain the words like “stock”, “invest”, “investor reports”. But to bypass spam filters, spammers can use the variations of the word “stock” such as “st0ck” or “stox”. So, if your inbox is flooded with penny stock tip, ignore it. Delete it. Do not believe anyone who tells you, “Invest quickly or you will miss out on a once-in-a lifetime opportunity.” Just don’t go thinking this is your big chance to hit pay-dirt. It is sounds too good to be true. The only ones profiting from these “spam e-mail tips” are the senders themselves – in this case spammers.

The history of the stock market has shown that the best and most trusted way to build wealth is to invest in high-quality businesses with excellent growth opportunites.

Investigate before you invest. Find out who sent the message to you. Ask whether the claims can be documented. Verify whether the claims are true before you send a nickel of your money.

But if you yielded to temptation and became a victim pf a stock scam, you can hire a lawyer to try to get your money back, but you need to know that recovery is rare. Just remember that the best protection is to take no action and stay away from bad deals in the first place.

from Julia Gulevich

Spam is unsolicited and unwanted email. Other common names of spam are spam mail, bulk email or just junk mail. Today, spam has reached such monumental proportions that almost every other message we receive is spam. Protecting the inbox with anti-spam filter has become one of the barest necessities for almost all PC users.

In a few words, anti-spam software helps detect spam. It is a program that detects unsolicited and unwanted e-mails, and doesn’t let them slipping into your inbox. The anti-spam program is installed onto your computer and filters your inbound emails. The email filtering is carried out based on a number of criteria. These can be specific words in the subject line or in the body of the message, type of files attached to the message, images embedded into the message. You could set the filter to check the sender’s email address out. If you have your own whitelist or address book with trusted email addresses, you could arrange the anti-spam filter to refer to that whitelist. It also can detect known spammers by checking a blacklist of habitual spam senders maintained by certain Internet Service Providers. If the email sender is on the blacklist, the message is rejected.

Anti-spam filters have adapted to the wiles of the spammers. They use techniques that do not trash legitimate emails by effectively analyzing the content of the email. Such software looks for keywords and tries to interpret their meanings in the sentences. Certain spam filters reject the messages if they come to you in the form of “Undisclosed Recipients”, and accept the emails where your email address is in the “To” or “Cc” fields.

Anti-spam filter is an essential part of your computer’s security tools if you want to ensure that you only receive the emails you want. Now you can select the right anti-spam software for your computer and start fighting spam.

from Julia Gulevich

The damage spam brings you is huge: loss of time, bandwidth and money, risk to delete a legitimate message together with junk emails. So, an anti-spam filter is not a whim but a necessity for almost all PC users who actively use email.

What criteria should you follow to choose the right spam filtering program? What capabilities must an anti-spam tool have to filter and cut off spam mail in most effective way?

Here are the main features a good anti-spam software must have to block spam effectively:

1) it should be a standalone spam filtering tool, which checks all incoming emails on the server, detects and deletes spam messages.

2) deletion of spam without receiving it in your inbox. This way you won’t download all the superfluous kilobytes into your inbox and you won’t see annoying spam mail.

3) powerful antispam filters built in one program that analyze the message from “outside” and “inside”: message header, message body, and message source. Flexible whitelist and blacklist easy to edit and update are also very useful as they help save much time when filtering emails. Good anti-spam software must also have the Bayesian filter in its arsenal of spam filtering tools.

4) easy and safe method to preview emails marked as spam. Inherent in antispam technology is the fact that there will be false positives and false negatives, i.e., email can be flagged as spam even though it is not actually spam and vice versa.

5) flexible spam filtering. Spam emails should be moved to a separate folder. A good spam filtering software should provide the ability to recover an email if it was accidentally marked as spam and trashed.

Simply put, an anti-spam program must be a standalone, easy-to-use software supplied with powerful anti-spam filters able to be adjusted by every user for his personal needs. Now with all that said above you can choose the right anti-spam software among all spam filtering programs available on the Internet.

from Julia Gulevich

E-mail is now being abused. The flow of spam on the Internet is the proof. It is annoying to download hundreds of disgusting spam emails into the inbox looking for some legitimate messages. Not only you waste your valuable time to delete junk emails by hand, you also waste your money as each spam message in your inbox takes precious kilobytes of bandwidth you paid for. In addition, spam messages can contain viruses, which can infect your computer system, and hidden tracking codes, which work as soon as you click on the message and let the spammer know that your email address is valid. With all that said, it would be great to delete the messages that you don’t want to receive beforehand and launch your email client to pull down only good emails. Anti-spam software can do this for you. It helps you fight against annoying spam.

There is a wide choice of anti-spam filters available on the Internet. The common services or features they offer are:

• Whitelist and Blacklist. The decision whether an email message is spam or good is taken based on the sender’s email address. The whitelist contains “friendly” email addresses, and the blacklist contains potential spammers, or simply people you don’t want to communicate with.

• Filtering based on the message subject or content. Some words or phrases are met in spam emails more often than others. These are usually vulgar or adult words (sometimes too offending). Thus, filtering based on a keyword is rather helpful.

• Virus scanning. There is possibility that spam email contains a virus in the attachment. Certain anti-spam programs allow you block emails with various suspicious attachments.

• Automatic spam detection. Some anti-spam filters can check inbound email and delete the emails they consider as spam automatically at a regular basis.

• Email recovering. Some spam blockers provide you with the ability to move spam emails to a quarantine folder and keep them for a fixed number of days. In addition, there is the possibility to recover an email from the trash if you need it.

So, with the great features and benefits that antispam software offers, you can now easily block the majority of spam emails.