Do you ever wonder what that box of funny looking letters asking you to re-type them is?  This method fights spammers and is called CAPTCHA which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart.  The people that are behind spam don’t have enough time to target millions of computers, email, and websites a day so they have botnets do the work for them.  The CAPTCHA is a site or a services way of filtering out these botnet machines from real people.  Some alternative methods being used are to look at a picture of something simple and asking you to type in what you see.  A human can clearly see there is a flower in the picture where as a computer would not be able to tell.

In September of 2009 Google acquired a large CAPTCHA  company named reCAPTCHA.  At first this acquisition seemed out of place but what if the squiggly letters or pictures were advertisements?  Google has not announced any plans of doing so, but it does seem plausible.  

Many people believe the future of computing is thought to be moving towards something called cloud computing. The notion of cloud computing is to use the internet as your hard drive.  The term “cloud” derives from logical drawings of a network and the internet is often represented as a cloud.  Those of you that use online calendars or web hosted email are already computing in the cloud.  Services like these  are broken down into three major categories:

1. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
2. Platform as a Service(PaaS), and
3. Software as a Service(SaaS).  

An example of IaaS is Microsoft’s SkyDrive.  Microsoft lets you use up to 25 GB of free storage online.  PaaS helps you use programming tools like Java or Python to develop web based applications.  Examples of SaaS are web based email, Google Docs, and our very own secure email spam filter, ProSpam.  The idea behind Software as a Service is to let others worry about the behind the scenes work and lets you as a user just know the software will work.

Maybe one day we won’t even use a traditional operating system on our personal computers to access our software and files or to run applications.  The functionality is already here and user satisfaction is what will keep cloud computing moving forward.  

There’s a new social networking tool in the world from Google named Buzz.  Whether we need another social network or not is not the concern, however the risk of Google Buzz just being another portal for spam is.  Google Buzz is tightly woven inside of gmail.  Google positively markets Buzz as an easy way to integrate comments with people in your address list, Twitter posts, and rss feeds from Google Reader.

Spammers are already utilizing these back doors into your email account.  Google Reader holds a lot of spam.  All it takes is one person you know to share a story with you and through Buzz, this spam story has found a nice cozy home in your email.  Google claims there are 160,000 posts per hour, but how many of these posts are spam?  According to Websense there is already a spammer on Buzz who is following 237 people sending spam about quiting smoking.  As you can see, fighting spam is a constant battle.  

Keep yourself informed and protected.  Keep fighting and blocking spam.  Let us help by offering you ProSpam email filter free for 30 days.

You might be wondering why you get so much spam, and you’d like to block it.   One likely cause for some of it is if you FORWARD jokes, political information, or other similar widely-distributed emails without hiding the TO and FROM addresses before you send it off.   If you forward messages this way (in the open), and the people you send them to also forward them that way, you are multiplying the list of valuable addresses contained in each message and providing a real gift to any spammer who gets it.

For normal business or personal emails, you want the recipients to know who else is seeing the information, so this protection isn’t necessary.   But when you are sending anything that might be re-forwarded to a larger audience, do yourself and others a favor by taking two simple steps before hitting SEND:

1. Type the forwarding addresses into the BCC (blind carbon copy) section, not in the TO or CC section.  This means that the receiver (and all future receivers of his forwards) will not see any of those addresses, so they can’t be harvested for spammer purposes.
2. Page down into the  body of the email and delete any visible email addresses.   This could take a few minutes, but remember that you are protecting those people’s privacy and fighting against the spammers.

That’s it – you should feel good when you send clean forwards, but remember that your address will still be visible to the receivers in the FROM section.   To protect yourself, share this with the family and friends that you normally forward things to and ask them to clean their forwards, too.

When you forward emails you may be supporting a GREAT cause or sending a HILARIOUS joke, but you might also be helping the spammers get rich!  Block Spam – Fight Spam – Let’s not make it easy for them!