Overrun By SPAM

Many of you know that there is tons and tons of spam floating around the internet. From kings or princes in some African country that has tons of money and wants to share it with you, or whether it's cheap drugs/viagra/cialis, your email box becomes full of it overnight. This is why email providers (such as Hotmail/Live, Yahoo, Gmail/Google, etc) invented the "Junk Mail" box and attempt to filter junk email to that box so you don't see it in your inbox. That's fine and dandy, but with the changing technologies on the web, spammers are getting smarter.

For any of those of you whom don't know what a wiki is, it is a completely customizable web page where anyone can edit the page and change or delete anything on the page, and even create new pages. Usually the way to get around this is to implement some from of validation to prove that whomever is doing the editing is, in fact, human. This can be done a few different ways. One of which Captcha images, another is user registration.

Captcha is a dynamically generated image of numbers and letters usually with a lot of "noise" in the background to fool image readers. The user is required to enter the letter and number combination EXACTLY as it appears in the image and that entry is validated against what the image actually contains. If the user input is correct, then the web application thinks there is a real human submitting the data and allows the submition. This is a really good way to cut down on spam while allowing users to do whatever they feel without having to register, but it makes it hard for people with disabilities, namely visual impairments as they can't see the Captcha image. This is why something called the Re-Captcha project was created. It has an audio player to play the words, as it uses whole words instead of random numbers and letters, overall, a great improvement over Captcha images.

The second form of cutting down on spam, is requiring users to register to the forums or with the wiki before the user can submit anything. This usually involves filling out a registration request form which often requires the user to enter a username, password and email address. It usually has to be a real email address as the user will be sent and email which they will have to verify that they are, in fact, a real live person. After that point the user will be required to log in to the forum or wiki before they can make changes.

These are two excellent ways to cut down on spam, but what about if you run your own email server? You will have to implement some form of virus and spam filtering. One good add-on program to a linux based email server, is Spamassassin. There are others, but Spamassassin is good, and with a small add-on to Spamassassin, you can have it download updates on a nightly schedule.

But I'm sure many of you do know what I'm talking about when it comes to spam, especially email spam as I'm sure your email is flooded with it on a daily basis, and maybe in some cases, and hourly bases.