What is spam?.

``Spam'' is a derogatory label attached to bulk email, that is, email which is sent in huge quantities to people who did not ask to receive such mail. Typically, the practice is done to present some sort of crass commercial advertisement.

What do spammers do?

Spammers take advantage of the economics of the Internet. In a nutshell, we pay to connect, and we pay for our own level of service, including the speed of our connection, the amount of equipment needed to relay mail, news, web, and other traffic, etc. By "advertising" through email, spammers shift the cost of advertising to the recipient. Further, because they so commonly relay through an unsuspecting third party and/or forge domain names, spammers even push the costs of cleaning up their mess to another party.

Another thing to consider is how large ISPs and organizations with a large number of users being hit by a spam have their email relays backed up, causing delays in service, and problems in taking care of the organization's own needs. Effectively, spammers are denying the company of their own Internet services because of overloading the machines that process the mail with advertising junk.

What have we done to minimize this?

As an I.B.S.P. we understand the importance of time management, therefore we have put in place a system for filtering and preventing spam from reaching our clients. Two servers have been set up, one in Cape Town and one in Midrand specifically for this purpose. Although not stopping the entirety, recent figures have show that out of 160 bulk messages coming through our spam servers only 5 reached clients as unsolicited mail. This in an environment where out of every 10 e-mails sent, 6 are spam messages.

What can you do?

While there are a number of things you can do with spammers, actually doing business with one should never be an option. As a rule, legitimate businesses do not advertise their products through unsolicited e-mail. Aside from demonstrating their contempt for your priorities by sending you spam, ostensible businesses which do so should be assumed to be untrustworthy. Unless you routinely upload your credit card information to newsgroups just to see how many unauthorized transactions can fit on a single Amex statement, you should never enter into any type of transaction with the author of spam e-mail.

We advise our valued clients that if spam is received, the mail should be forwarded to spamabuse@netralink.com as an attachment, this is so the message, as an entirety, can be added to our vast database in order for the mail to be recognized in future and stopped.