Electronic mail is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic (digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant only physical mail. Email later became a ubiquitous communication medium, to the point that in current use, an e-mail address is often treated as a basic and necessary part of many processes in business, commerce, government, education, entertainment, and other spheres of daily life in most countries. Email is the medium, and each message sent therewith is called an email.
Various anti-spam techniques are used to prevent email spam.
The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act of 2003 is a law passed in 2003 establishing the United States' first national standards for the sending of commercial e-mail. The law requires the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to enforce its provisions. Introduced by Republican Conrad Burns, the act passed both the House and Senate during the 108th United States Congress and was signed into law by President George W. Bush in December of 2003.
Email spam, also referred to as junk email or simply spam, is unsolicited messages sent in bulk by email (spamming).
Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an email authentication method designed to detect forging sender addresses during the delivery of the email. SPF alone, though, is limited to detecting a forged sender claim in the envelope of the email, which is used when the mail gets bounced. Only in combination with DMARC can it be used to detect the forging of the visible sender in emails, a technique often used in phishing and email spam.
A joe job is a spamming technique that sends out unsolicited e-mails using spoofed sender data. Early joe jobs aimed at tarnishing the reputation of the apparent sender or inducing the recipients to take action against them, but they are now typically used by commercial spammers to conceal the true origin of their messages and to trick recipients into opening emails apparently coming from a trusted source.
Internet security is a branch of computer security. It encompasses the Internet, browser security, web site security, and network security as it applies to other applications or operating systems as a whole. Its objective is to establish rules and measures to use against attacks over the Internet. The Internet is an inherently insecure channel for information exchange, with high risk of intrusion or fraud, such as phishing, online viruses, trojans, ransomware and worms.
A bounce message or just "bounce" is an automated message from an email system, informing the sender of a previous message that the message has not been delivered. The original message is said to have "bounced".
Norton Internet Security, developed by Symantec Corporation, was a computer program that provided malware protection and removal during a subscription period. It used signatures and heuristics to identify viruses. Other features included a personal firewall, email spam filtering, and phishing protection. With the release of the 2015 line in summer 2014, Symantec officially retired Norton Internet Security after 14 years as the chief Norton product. It was superseded by Norton Security, a rechristened adaptation of the Norton 360 security suite.
Email authentication, or validation, is a collection of techniques aimed at providing verifiable information about the origin of email messages by validating the domain ownership of any message transfer agents (MTA) who participated in transferring and possibly modifying a message.
Barracuda Networks, Inc. is a company providing security, networking and storage products based on network appliances and cloud services. The company's security products include products for protection against email, web surfing, web hackers and instant messaging threats such as spam, spyware, trojans, and viruses. The company's networking and storage products include web filtering, load balancing, application delivery controllers, message archiving, NG firewalls, backup services and data protection.
Email spoofing is the creation of email messages with a forged sender address.
Kaspersky Internet Security is an internet security suite developed by Kaspersky Lab compatible with Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Kaspersky Internet Security offers protection from malware, as well as email spam, phishing and hacking attempts, and data leaks. Kaspersky Lab Diagnostics results are distributed to relevant developers through the MIT License.
Backscatter is incorrectly automated bounce messages sent by mail servers, typically as a side effect of incoming spam.
Brightmail Inc. was a San Francisco-based technology company focused on anti-spam filtering. Brightmail's system has a three-pronged approach to stopping spam, the Probe Network is a massive number of e-mail addresses established for the sole purpose of receiving spam. The Brightmail Logistics and Operations Center (BLOC) evaluates newly detected spam and issues rules for ISPs. The third approach is the Spam Wall, a filtering engine that identifies and screens out spam based on the updates from the BLOC.
Proofpoint, Inc. is an American enterprise security company based in Sunnyvale, California that provides software as a service and products for email security, data loss prevention, electronic discovery, and email archiving.
A feedback loop (FBL), sometimes called a complaint feedback loop, is an inter-organizational form of feedback by which a mailbox provider (MP) forwards the complaints originating from their users to the sender's organizations. MPs can receive users' complaints by placing report spam buttons on their webmail pages, or in their email client, or via help desks. The message sender's organization, often an email service provider, has to come to an agreement with each MP from which they want to collect users' complaints.
Cyberhound Pty Ltd, is an Australian-owned provider of internet and email security, filtering and management solutions founded in Brisbane by John Oxnam, Justin Cook and Trent Davis in 1999. It is a privately held company. CyberHound's head office is located in Fortitude Valley, Queensland, Australia. The company provides products for internet compliance, management and security.
SmartScreen is a cloud-based anti-phishing and anti-malware component included in several Microsoft products, including Windows 8 and later, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge and Outlook.com. It is designed to help protect users against attacks that utilize social engineering and drive-by downloads to infect a system by scanning URLs accessed by a user against a denylist of websites containing known threats. With the Windows 10 Creators Update, Microsoft placed the SmartScreen settings into the Windows Defender Security Center.
A cold email is an unsolicited e-mail that is sent to a receiver without prior contact. It could also be defined as the email equivalent of cold calling. Cold emailing is a subset of email marketing and differs from transactional and warm emailing.
