Robert@PNG

I don’t know about you but my “inbox” ends up with at least a few dozen spam emails a day and I’m positive that if it wasn’t for the filtering software there would literally be hundreds if not thousands!

Email spam… an occupational nuisance and unfortunately a fact of life if you are an email user. With time one does tend to develop the ability to recognise/delete spam very quickly and in practice this task doesn’t really consume a great deal of extra time.

I did receive one such spam a few days ago and normally I would have hit the delete button faster than what you can say “full stop” but there was something about this one that somehow attracted my attention. The wording of some of these unsolicited emails can easily fool and trick many of the uninitiated. Here’s that email:

Goodday,

I apologise for invading your privacy,and crave your indulgence.I am Mike Maga,former Bank manager of UNION BANK PLC,2000-57 west street,Marina Lagos.Nigeria. Read through my message. THIS IS NOT A SPAM MAIL!

On June 6th 1999, an Oil Consultant/Contractor with the Nigerian Petroleum Corporation, Mr. Ahmed Youseff Mustafa,a national of Bahrain, made a numbered time(fixed)deposit for 12 calendar months, value USD18,000,000.00 in my branch.

On maturity, i sent a routine notification to his forwarding address but got no reply. After a month,i sent a reminder and finally, his contract employers, the Nigerian Petroleum Corporation. wrote to inform me that Mr. A Y Mustafa has been absent without leave.and is assumed he has left the co-operation.

I therefore made further investigations and discovered that Mr. Mustafa had actively opposed the Government of his country,was consequently driven into exile. Being an Oil Expert,he subsequently obtained a job with the NNPC,and settled in Nigeria . Thereafter, he walked into my Office to make the aforementioned deposit of USD18m.

He did not declare any kin in his application paperwork, contrary to laid down procedures, and when I asked him he informed me that he wished it so. I accepted his application because banks are conservative and will always honor a customers wishes, especially high networth
customers.

No one knows the source of his money because apparently the time frame of his employment with the NNPC does indeed preclude such a large amount of money. It can be assumed that he brought his money over from Bahrain, but that is open to speculation. However, the point is that his employers are not aware of this money.

Now that i am no longer with the bank i took it upon myself to make further investigations that took me to Bahrain there i discovered that he was a close friend of Saddam Hussein and had travelled to see him and never came back,he is said to be believed to have died in iraq.

Now i want to present you as the next of Kin to the deceased so we can claim the funds.

The method of achieving this objective is as follows i shall supply you with the account number,the original deposit certificate and other sworn affidavits that you would be required to make you stand in as the next of kin.i already have some of these documents in my possesion as i was careful enough to get them before i left the bank,others i dont have now i shall talk to an attorney who is a friend of mine to get for me.then you shall contact the bank claiming beneficiary to the funds.

If you agree to be my partner and to stand in as the benificiary i need you to forward to me your phone and fax number. we need to talk better on phone.

Looking forward to your urgent reply…

After reading the above spam email I thought “you bastard” and was subsequently prompted to write this short article.

Spam is defined by Wikipedia as…

Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet forum spam and junk fax transmissions.

Spamming remains economically viable because advertisers have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists, and it is difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings. Because the barrier to entry is so low, spammers are numerous, and the volume of unsolicited mail has become very high. The costs, such as lost productivity and fraud, are borne by the public and by Internet service providers, which have been forced to add extra capacity to cope with the deluge. Spamming is widely reviled, and has been the subject of legislation in many jurisdiction.

Persons who create electronic spam are called spammers.

And from http://www.tamingthebeast.com/ we can see the alarming statistics:

While we might not see the bulk of the spam and viruses headed our way courtesy of the filtering systems provided by our ISP or web host; the onslaught by malicious and unsolicited messages has by no means abated. In fact, it’s getting worse on all fronts - be it email, blog comment or splog spam.

According to current statistics from Postini, 10 out of 12 messages are spam and 1 in 39 emails contain a virus.

There exists a whole collection of “critters” that roam the internet 24 by 7 searching not only for email addresses but basically anything and everything. These so called critters have names - they are called: bots, robots, spiders and agents - and then there’s harvesters and there’s scrapers. These viral software programs literally prowl the internet for names, stories, other potentially valuable data and of course email addresses. Websites, blogs, forums and free email services are hit by these automatons at a rate of knots you would not believe. My blog for example gets hit by close to 10,000 bots, agents and spiders a day - considering I currently get around 100 visitors a day - I could easily be fooled that my blog had become a popular site to visit.

Back to email spam…

What does one do? Here are some pointers that might relieve some of the angst around this nuisance topic:

• Accept that you will never eradicate spam email 100%
• In addition to the anti virus/sypware software you might be running and if you find spam absolutely unbearable - you might like to consider installing additional software that specially blocks spam.
• Remember that the more spam you block and the tighter you configure spam blocking rules the greater the chances that you might block genuine emails. Find a balance.
• When using a distribution list or you are sending emails to a large number of recipients ensure that you take full advantage of the Blind Copy (bcc) feature present in most (if not all) email programs.
• If you receive an email that contains email addresses (perhaps if its already been forwarded several times) and if you would then like to forward this email - always ensure that these other addresses are removed from your response before sending it.