Spam Glossary

Address Harvesting - A software bot that scours websites looking for email addresses to spam.

Address Spoofing - Falsifying the sending address of an email or spam.

Bayesian Filtering - A statistical probability of spammyness based on a statistically significant sample base.

Blackhole List - A public or commercial server listing IP addresses of known spammers - Highly problematic, blackholes are only a small. part of the solution.

Client Side - Your email application i.e. Thunderbird, Eduora, or even Outlook.

Content Filtering - A simple checking of certain words in an email. A rather useless technique given the character substitution tricks these days.

Denial of Service (DoS) attack - To make a email server unavailable by overwhelming its resources.

Dictionary attack - Attempt to guess a password to gain relay access. If you don't want to be part of the problem, don't have a info@<some-domain> address with password 'info'.!

DNS - Domain Name Server - Humans think in terms of domain names like spam-dam.com. But computers think in terms of numbers, or IP addresses. A DNS server takes a domain name, and resolves that name to an IP address. This is how you can inter spam-dam.com into a browser, and your browser looks up the IP address for spam-dam.com using a DNS server.

Domain Name System blackhole List or DNSBL - A public or commercial server listing domain names of known spammers. Your ISP might be one.

False Positive - A ham that was caught as a spam.

False Negative - A spam that passed through as a ham.

Greylisting - The SMTP protocol is a store and forward protocol, meaning that if the recipient domain is not available, the sending server will store and retry. A server using greylisting works by reporting itself as unavailable at the moment. Legitimate mail servers will retry after X amount of minutes. Spammers will not bother to retry after X minutes - they've got other suckers to deliver to.

Phishing - Pronounced 'fishing', this is where someone creates an identical look and feel of a legit website, and convinces unsuspecting users into revealing passwords or financial information. PayPal.com is a popular phishing scam today.

Ham - A legitimate email.

Header - Embedded information in an email. Some visible, some hidden. The From, To, and Subject fields of an email are all examples of headers.

Honeypot - A mail server setup to appear to spammers as an open relay

Joe job - A spamming campaign with spoofed sender address or domain. The innocent domain is blamed by the ignorant and is also deluged with bounces notifications.

Munging - Obfuscating an email address to avoid harvesting. For example support at acme dot com.

NDR spam - Non Delivery Report - Fooling the recipient into thinking an email bounced, they gleefully open the message only to find a spam.

Open relay - Oh happy day for a spammer. Before spam, many servers were open since the SMTP protocol specifies relay availability. An open relay allows someone without a valid account, or outside the local network to send (relay) email to another party. Legitimate uses of relaying include allowing off-site employees to send through the corporate server. Securing against open relay is the top priority of an email administrator - bar nothing! Says me!

Real-time blackhole list (RBL) - Like DNSBL but works on IP address instead of domain name. Also fraught with innocents, RBL lookups are only a small part of the solution, not the big stick solution.

Revenge - Replying to a spam 'unsubscribe' offer, using the email address of a jerk or sphincter orifice.

Server Side - The spam blocking occurs on the mail server before it has a chance of getting into your inbox.

Snail mail - Regular US Post mail.

Spam Pit - An folder that receives emails tagged as being spams.

Spoofing - A forged senders address. A spoofed address explains spams from legitimate companies. Spoofing is also used in phishing scams and any other BS email you might get.

Tarpitting - A server that becomes 'sticky' is tarpitting. Spammers are in a hurry. If we dawdle along with sticky connections, the spammers are liable to move on. Tarpitting is when a server is slow with its responses. Tarpitting is also used by humans when returning calls to problematic customers.

Whitelist - A list of publicly addressable IP addresses or domains that are trusted by the receiving server. Any email from these addresses bypasses the spam filters.