Spam e-mail

E-mail has become one of the most popular Internet services for instant and convenient message delivery. The classic definition of spam is unsolicited bulk messages, that is, messages sent to multiple recipients who did not ask for them. The problems caused by spam are due to the combination of the unsolicited and bulk aspects; the quantity of unwanted messages swamps messaging systems and drowns out the messages that recipients do want.

The impact of spam on the Internet community is great, causing significant financial costs and losses in productivity. Spam creates problems such as cost shifting, fraud, resource wastage, and the displacement of legitimate mail. The proliferation of spam is also a potential threat to the credibility of e-mail as a reliable and efficient means of communication over the Internet.

The original impetus for spam was advertising. A famous early usenet spam was from a lawyer advertising immigration service (“green card lottery”) and early e-mail spams advertised computer equipment, purported blueprints for atomic bombs, and magazine subscriptions. Since spam is so cheap, and is often anonymous, it is also popular for marginally or completely illegal schemes including fake drugs, pump and dump stock touts, money mule recruiting, and advance fee fraud.

Spam can merely carry annoying but benign advertising; however, it can also be the initial contact for cybercriminals, such as the operators of a fraudulent scheme who use emails to solicit prospective victims for money or to commit identity theft by deceiving recipients into sharing personal and financial account information.
Spam e-mail

Junk Email

Junk email is bulk email, spam or other unwanted email messages. Unwanted junk email is annoying and disruptive, forcing the user to wade through huge amounts of useless or offensive messages just to find the one the user needs.

It is certainly a scourge. Junk emails also potentially serve as part of Phishing scams. The phishing email asks the user to update personal information or provides a link that takes the user to a fake website that asks to supply passwords or other personal information.

To help reduce this problem, Windows Live Mail includes a built-in filter that automatically screens email to identify and separate the junk email from legitimate email. Windows Live Mail automatically identifies many types of junk email from the first use, often without the need for feedback from the user.

However, the end user can throttle the sensitivity of the junk email feature to catch more junk email.

The junk email filter helps reduce unwanted messages in user inbox. Junk email also known as spam, is moved by the filter to the Junk Email Folder. The filter evaluates each incoming message to assess whether or not it might be spam, based on several factors such as message content and the time the message was sent.
Junk Email

Features of Electronic Mail

The first thing many people do at work all over the world is check their e-mail. Electronic mail has changed the way people work and communicate.

E-mail is electronically transmitted mail via computer and hand phone. Depending on its size, which is weighed in bytes, the transmission of data takes places within a few seconds or minutes.

Based on history, E-mail is a byproduct of the US military Defense System. Before the usefulness of E-mail was perceived, the internet was widely employed initially for military and academic use.

Millions of end users now depend on E-mail software to communicate with each other by sending and receiving electronic messages via the Internet or their organizations’ intranets or extranets.

E-mail is used in businesses, government department, universities, schools, homes, kiosks and on mobile laptops, hand phone, pagers and personal digital assistants.

E-mail is the fastest, most flexible, cost efficient, personalized and targeted communication medium in the world today.

Full featured E-mail software like Microsoft Exchange E-mail can route the messages to multiple end users based on predefined mailing lists and provide password security, automatic message forwarding and remote user access.

They also allow us store messages in folders with provisions for adding attachments to message files. E-mail packages may also enable us to edit and send graphics and multimedia as well as text, and provide bulletin board and computer conferencing capabilities.

People have two fundamental communication needs that various forms of technology can aid: speed and regularity.

While the telephone provides rapid, real time communication, electronic mail provides a regularity that is lacking in telephone communication.

E-mail became popular because of its relatively low cost, high reliability and most instantaneous delivery as compared with regular mail.

E-mail provides a high level of informality, a sense of community and sharing, wide tolerance of selling and typographical errors and brevity of expression.
Features of Electronic Mail