Everyone (by now) knows what spam is and by far it is one of the most hated ‘things’ of this world. Although it comes in many forms, people tend to be a lot more sensitive to spam when it relates to their email than their snail mail or any other form of it.
Junk is junk no matter how you want to see it. If I have not asked for something, then you are spamming me. If I politely say no the first time – don’t send me any of the junk you are selling - I do not want it! Simple as that.
If materials (email form, mail form etc.) ignore the above then they are categorized as spam.
I have mentioned in a previous post that I have moved my domain to Google Apps and of course with it my email. This move allowed me to be virtually spam free, since Google’s spam filter is the best one there is. The random email that I will get maybe once a month is not a problem since I can report it as spam and never see it again.
With the evolution of blogs and the need to allow people to comment on one’s blog entries, spammers found new ground to spread their disease. The blog’s comment box became a really good target, thus automated bots have been created to post junk in a blog’s comment box. These entries make no sense, they contain links mostly to pharmaceutical products and sometimes are really funny. Their purpose though is to establish links pointing to a particular site (or sites) so that search engines (mainly Google) would be ‘fooled’ to bring the target site higher in the search result listing.
Features like rel=’nofollow’ on the href declaration of every link in the comments can help with this situation. This directive instructs the search engine spider not to follow the link in the new site, thus negating the intended spam’s behavior.
The Akismet plugin for WordPress blogs (such as this one) allows for a more automated protection against spam. Akismet captures spam comments and keeps them in a queue where the admin of the blog (moi!) can go later on and check if there are any false positives caught in the spam queue. I have to give kudos to everyone involved in creating the plugin to Akismet and the service itself. This contribution to bloggers around the world is invaluable.
The cure to spam? Delete it and/or ignore it. The spammers of this world thrive if they see a return on the investment. Note that there are two parties in the equation. The first party is the spammer, the person that actually does the deed – runs the mail server, sends the emails, creates the spam comments etc. The second guilty party is the actual employer of that spammer. The XYZ corporation that wants to sell pharmaceutical products or printer supplies etc. If the latter gets a zero return on their investment, then they will stop paying the spammers to send junk to us. Since their return on investment is minimal (I read somewhere that one needs 1/100,000 return to break even) they will keep on hiring spammers to send more and more spam.
What do you need to do? Just ignore spam. Report it, delete it, ignore it, protect against it. Don’t buy anything from spam related messages in an effort to reduce and hopefully negate the return on investment of the spammer’s employer. This will effectively benefit not only yourself but everyone else that uses the Internet.
I will leave you with two spam messages caught in Akismet a week ago which I find really funny:
For my post about SSL Certificates:
Normally, university teachers are willing to examine the business term paper writing technique of their students, nevertheless not all students can to write correctly because of a job or other issues. Therefore, a essay writing service should aid to compose the term paper thesis professionally.
For my post about PHP and the Factory Pattern:
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