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What is SPAM?
SPAM is defined as electronic junk mail or junk newsgroup postings. Some people define
SPAM even more generally as any unsolicited e-mail.
SPAM is an unfortunate problem of using the Internet, just as receiving junk mail is when using the US postal service. NTS-Online.net’s Internet administration group is constantly upgrading our mail servers to combat SPAM.
There are always new revisions of software being applied to help combat SPAM. The difficulty is separating the SPAM e-mail from the real e-mail. Mailing lists containing valid e-mail users are bought and sold constantly on the Internet, making the elimination of SPAM almost impossible.
We will continue to do the best we can at stopping SPAM. While at the same time making sure our customers valid e-mail’s get to their intended destination.
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How does it work?
There are companies that make a lot of money by collecting, or harvesting, email addresses. There are many ways these companies are able to do this.
Four of the most common are:
--- They use small program called 'Bots' or 'Spiders' to search websites, newsgroups, and
collected emails with extra addresses - such as forwarded jokes, etc...
--- They learn of a valid ISP or Mail domain (in this case, @nts-online.net). Then, they take
the most common combinations for email addresses - common first names, with last
initials of every letter of the alphabet, common last names with first initials, etc...) and
generate a list of email addresses from this, and then send out one mass mailing to this
list. All addresses that are rejected as invalid are then removed from the list, and it is
sold.
--- Anytime you subscribe to the newsletters, or give out your email address to any website,
you risk having your address added to a list that is then sold.
--- Lastly, there are "cookies" and other small programs that load with some web pages that
read your email setting from your computer, without your knowledge. These are usually
placed on a web site by a company that helps to financially support the page. The
program can be loaded by displaying images on the web site, as there can be a "Web
Bug" which is a small image too small for you to see, that loads these programs. It can
also be loaded from those banner ads you see across the tops of some pages. For the
banners to work, you do NOT have to click on the banner - they can do it simply by being
displayed on the page itself.
We are always striving to filter out as much spam as possible. Our aggressive filtering practices currently remove approximately 85% of the junk mail flowing through our servers. At these settings, we receive about 10 to 20 complaints per day about mail that is being filtered that shouldn't be. It is impossible to block 100% of this junk mail due to these reasons.
How to prevent SPAM?
The only suggestion we can make is to use your search engine of choice, such as Yahoo, Lycos, Google, etc..., and perform a search for "Spam Filter". This will generally result in thousands of hits. Some of the hits are for spam filtering services, some of which are free and some are fee based, and some of them are for third-party software that you install on your computer, and it filters your email based upon rules and regulations you provide and setup.
As neither of these solutions are actually provided by NTS, we can only suggest them, but cannot make any recommendations, or provide any kind of support, for these products.
The only other solution would be to change your email address, and this will only work until the new address finds its way onto another, new mailing list.
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