You can’t blame Gordon Wozniak for trying to reduce spam, even if his proposed method is a bit flaky.

The Berkley California councilman has suggested that one way to stop spam and save the United States Post Office is to tax emails that are sent. The logic behind the proposal is that taxing emails by the gigabit would help prevent scam artists from sending hundreds of thousands of spam emails because it severely cut into their return on investment. While stopping the spread of junk email, the legitimate messages would help put some cash back into the coffers of the post office.

This proposal is nothing new, in fact in 1997 the same measure was proposed in a Harvard Law School talk. However this time the proposal is a bit more timely as the Internet Tax Freedom Act signed by President Clinton is set to expire in 2014.

  Online gambling has been unwelcome in the United States for some time, but recently several states have legalized it. 888 Holdings is the very first company to be approved to operate in the US, but that achievement has been …

Researchers have discovered that spammers have started exploiting the Google Translate service in order to help keep their messages by being flagged and blocked by spam filters. They are using the translation service to mask the true destination of the URLs …

You can never have too much bandwidth, too much RAM, or too much hard drive space, but you can definitely have too much spam. Despite all that we read about advances in anti-spam technology and legal actions against spammers, there’s still a lot of spam in most peoples’ inboxes each day. Rather than focus on corporate email systems and all the technologies available to them, in today’s post we’re going to look at seven simple steps almost anyone can take to help get less spam in their mailbox. Let’s start with…

Spring is here, finally. The long, cold winter is quickly becoming a distant nightmare and, as the birds return to their chirping and the grass begins to grow, it’s time to think about spring cleaning. But before you go looking for your vacuum, worry not. There’s no manual labor involved in this type of spring cleaning, because we’re talking about spam. If you’re not into outdoor winter activities, there’s a good chance that you’ve spent the cold months trying to keep yourself from going stir crazy. That may mean you’ve been tweeting and liking, and most likely, sending a lot of emails. And even if you’re not an Apple iCloud user, you may have discovered that your emails aren’t getting where they need to be.

A California politician has proposed a tax on email as a way to deter spam and keep the struggling U.S. Postal Service afloat. Berkeley City Councilman Gordon Wozniak, (no relation to Steve!) says the idea, while it may be an …

Have you ever wondered how an anti-spam filter stops all that junk mail from filling up your, and your users, inbox? It’s not magic. There is no spam fairy that stands guard with a bucket of pixie dust ready to rid the inbox of malicious email.

If it were that easy, spam certainly wouldn’t be the problem that it is today. In all seriousness, fighting against malicious emails like spam and phishing attacks can be a rather complex process that should have multiple layers because without a series of countermeasures in place attackers would simply bypass the technical controls used to filter out these harmful email messages.

But just what technologies are in place to help defend against malicious emails? Here is a list of some of the more common methods that your security system might have in place…

A security firm is reporting that a recent campaign of malicious spam is linked to the Blackhole exploit kit. The messages are masquerading as fake news alerts from CNN and the BBC. The news alerts appear to be exploiting the …

What history of spam would be complete without a look at the technologies we use every day to try to keep the amount of spam hitting our mailbox to a minimum? In today’s post, we’re going to take a look at how some of those technologies that anti-spam solutions use to keep the majority of the junk from ever hitting our inbox have evolved over time. From the earliest responses to spam, through technologies that even today are in their infancy, these are the tools of the trade, and even the oldest are still in use today. We won’t look at every single technology out there, but we will cover the main ones. Let’s start our look with the original anti-spam tool…

Ohhh, man. Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the inbox. We’ve known for a while now that spam is getting more targeted, more devious and much more dangerous. The attacks are getting fast and furious too, even the scorched earth campaigns, which are getting past the anti-spam filters. And while most of us deal with it the only way possible – one spam attack at a time – a new threat is looming and it might just be the one that nips you in the wallet.

Known as ‘influence manipulation’ and dubbed ‘black hat data science’ by data scientist Joseph Turian, black hat spam, according to an article at CNNMoney entitled “Can evil data scientists fool us all with the world’s best spam?” is:

“a new generation of spam that does away with brute force email barrages in favor of fake online personas so real that people — and, more importantly, email and web-service spam filters — can’t tell they’re fake.” And the implications are far-reaching. “Done right, these fake identities could influence everything from app downloads to e-commerce to elections.”

At the O’Reilly Strata Conference in late February, Turian gave a presentation where he stated that “It’s a pretty serious issue and it’s also pretty hard to catch.” Black hat data science, the article points out, is really just white hat data science that’s been turned on its head so it can be used for evil purposes.