CAVIRC.net - Privacy and Spamming

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PrivacyIf message's content is not particularly private it could be enough to rely on the fact that nobody will try to intercept that particular message among the big email flow in Internet. On the other hand the risk of spreading confidential informations has to be considered. In this case cryptography can give us support: the easiest way to use cryptography is by common email application (i.e. Outlook) that have it embedded. How it works:- first of all we must receive a signed message from the receiver of our encrypted messages: our email software (mostly automatically) stores the certificate identifying the person and its associated email box; - at the same time we must have our own signature certificate associated to our email account; - at the end we send the message specifying that it has to be encrypted. The system automatically encrypts the message so that it can be read with the sender's and the receiver's certificate.Be careful: cryptography prevents from detecting and deleting virus contained in the message. SpammingMany users sometimes have to run an obstacle race in reading email because of undesired messages' presence (SPAM). Those messages are usually commercial offers or &quot;chain letters&quot; and in many cases have unpleasant, offensive or obscene contents. Some email services include specific tools to contrast spamming phenomenon, the so-called Anti Spamming Filters. At the moment this type of tools don't seem completely reliable. We list some examples of possible situations:- some tools are based on &quot;black lists&quot; of domains from which in past came a lot of unwanted messages: all messages from these domains are removed; but this &quot;cleaning&quot; could delete even some important message from trusted senders (just because messages come from black-listed domains); plus the lists can be incomplete compared to the extent of the phenomenon and allow through undesired emails.- some tools scan messages' texts searching for common expressions in particular sorts of undesired  email; in this case too we could loose messages from trusted senders: words present in undesired message can be used in normal messages in other context; moreover, unwanted messages can use a professional language undetecteble by analysis tools.- some systems erase email containing particular attachment types, or messages coming from same sender in a brief period of time. In this case it seems clear that important email communications could be cancelled and unwellcome messages could be left out.- some systems use above check tools finally don't delete messages, just marking them as  &quot;probably undesired&quot; emails. This way service benefit is very modest because we must read and choose which messages have to be removed.- some systems allows users to choose email addresses from whom they don't want receive emails anymore. Again this measure is not enough because spamming actions generally use alway different accounts.Conclusions: at the moment there's not a real complete anti-spamming software; in any case spamming is considered a crime that can be reported to the postal police.   </PRE>