SPAM: Economics and Prevention

SPAM is unsolicited mail delivered to you, wasting your time and consuming resources. This applies to both physical mail and electronic ones (email).

While you're typically protected by laws against physical SPAM to a certain extent, email is uncontrollable and has been on the rise ever since it started some time in the 1990's.

Many preventative measures have been taken throughout time to fight email SPAM, but it has only worked on marginally classifying and separating your email from SPAM.

One should ask: Why do we keep receiving SPAM? How come it never stops?
A simple answer is that it's being funded!

The rise of malicious software known as worms has given the option for mischievous companies or groups to take control of thousands of user machines and use them to send SPAM to millions of users around the world.

Those shady companies or groups are charging money to promote products of other companies. Mostly drugs but may include promotions to other products.

A simple conclusion is that if you penalize companies that pay for shady groups to use such abusive methods, SPAM would almost disappear.

If governments that house such companies refuse too cooperate, ISPs worldwide can contribute to major SPAM reduction by making it a national law to ensure that your computers at home and company are clean.

ISPs can monitor traffic patterns and identify malicious traffic, after that, it should be obliged to notify users that are suspected to be infected and as such, those users must clean their machines or be fined, and if they don't comply, inflate the fine and so on.

When taking such measures, governments allowing shady companies to operate and pay for SPAM groups to run can be blacklisted, by blocking all IP addresses from that country.

This has another powerful side effect: When blocking IP addresses of a whole country, businesses in that country will be severely affected and will demand law enforcement of criminalizing the offenders responsible for SPAM and those funding it.

IT Consultant

As tempting as it was, I didn't open the email.

Arabic Spam: Origination & Continuation

I remember receiving the first bunch in the late '90s, and the start of the new millenium. If I'm not mistaken, the first batch of email addresses was harvested from Microsoft Hotmail's website, where they created default profiles for email users and associated it with their country, as set during the registration process. But that wasn't an easy way to collect the emails, and at the time, wasn't worth the trouble, as companies didn't see the benefit of spam, yet.

A few months later, things evolved and people started harvesting emails from email forwards. Whenever someone sends an email, they stuff all the emails into the "TO" field, and off they send it. When the recipient clicks on the forward button to forward the message, the header of the old message is dumped as part of the new message (the forward), containing the list of emails of all the people to whom it was sent to previously.
I know 4-5 people who actually spend time to clean the email list, before sending a forward. And the same 4-5 people, use the "BCC" field, instead of the "TO" field. Whomever receives the emails, doesn't see the list of emails.
Unfortunately, this continues to this day, and emails are still being collected and spammed, because of 2 things: E-Mail providers are too lazy to filter out list of emails, and people are too lazy to do the same!!!
If you're wondering why this is specific to Arabic Spam only, it's because non-Arab sites spam using Spamming services! They send emails using brute-force and don't actually care whether you're an Arab, or not.