This is one area where Hindi rules! Your Spam filter is set up to check obscenities in English but allows free access to the good old Ch*****, B**** C***, M** C*** in Hindi to your mail box.Multi functional mailboxes are not equipped to filter abusive words or obscene slangs in Hindi or any of the Indian languages as most administrators filter only English words. Even foreign companies, eager to sell their Viagras and adult websites, are resorting to obscene Hindi words to reach out to the curious netizens.
According to rough estimates, pornography alone accounted for 2.5 billion daily emails sent in 2006, equating to 4.5 daily porn emails per person. Most of these mails have subject lines containing obscene words to catch the attention of the reader.
“These Spammers are true geniuses. They are geeks of the networking and coding world. They use modern technologies and latest software to trap the netizens. Now they are using Hindi to reach mailboxes. Spams are generated to earn money and not only are they irritating, but once you start downloading from these sites, they can be fatal for your system,” said Winson Fernandis, a software engineer in Virtual Wires.
“In India there aren’t many restrictions and even Spam filters are not effective.
Most of the servers accept English as their basic language so the filters are not able to keep out foul words in foreign languages. This is why Hindi or vernacular scripts easily slip through the word filters. For instance, a word like VIAGRA is blacklisted and every filter traces it and sends the mail to the Spam folder, but these Spammers are so smart that they write the same word in different order like V1aGra or V*I*A*g*R*a to escape the filters”, he added.
IACM director Ravinder Goyal said, “All the development of software and technologies is done abroad so English is the processing language. That is why most of the mail filters cannot trace Hindi slangs. At the server level, one can identify such Spam by making a private domain where there is an option to get protection from it. But at an individual level, it is not that effective. Gmail has a strong filter as compared to Yahoo and Indiatimes. A user can manually get his mail protected from Spam but it can create problems as many times, safe mails get into the Spam folder,” Goel added.
“Mails are marked as Spams on the basis of subject, sender, receiver, word and size of the mail. English is accepted globally so mails in any other foreign language are not marked as Spams. But users can manually mark unwanted words as “report Spam” and the mail containing such words would be automatically sent to the Spam folder,” said Rajveer, a software developer.
Sharad Natani, a management student, said, “I receive more Spam than normal mail. Now Spammers are using Hindi slangs. Earlier I use to check every Spam and my Spam folder was always full. I have formatted my computer twice because of it.”
In absolute numbers
1978 - An e-mail Spam is sent to 600 addresses.
1994 - First large-scale Spam sent to 6000 newsgroup, reaching millions of people.
2005 - (June) 30 billion per day
2006 - (June) 55 billion per day
2006 - (December) 85 billion per day
2007 - (February) 90 billion per day
Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group estimates that 80-85% of incoming mail is "abusive email", as of the last quarter of 2005.
According to Sophos, the major sources of Spam in the second quarter of 2007 (April to June) were the United States (the origin of 19.6% of Spam messages), followed by China (8.4%) and South Korea (6.5%). When grouped by continents, Spam comes mostly from Asia (35,2%), Europe (28,5%) and North America (24,2%). Overall volume has increased 9% in the last year
According to rough estimates, pornography alone accounted for 2.5 billion daily emails sent in 2006, equating to 4.5 daily porn emails per person. Most of these mails have subject lines containing obscene words to catch the attention of the reader.
“These Spammers are true geniuses. They are geeks of the networking and coding world. They use modern technologies and latest software to trap the netizens. Now they are using Hindi to reach mailboxes. Spams are generated to earn money and not only are they irritating, but once you start downloading from these sites, they can be fatal for your system,” said Winson Fernandis, a software engineer in Virtual Wires.
“In India there aren’t many restrictions and even Spam filters are not effective.
Most of the servers accept English as their basic language so the filters are not able to keep out foul words in foreign languages. This is why Hindi or vernacular scripts easily slip through the word filters. For instance, a word like VIAGRA is blacklisted and every filter traces it and sends the mail to the Spam folder, but these Spammers are so smart that they write the same word in different order like V1aGra or V*I*A*g*R*a to escape the filters”, he added.
IACM director Ravinder Goyal said, “All the development of software and technologies is done abroad so English is the processing language. That is why most of the mail filters cannot trace Hindi slangs. At the server level, one can identify such Spam by making a private domain where there is an option to get protection from it. But at an individual level, it is not that effective. Gmail has a strong filter as compared to Yahoo and Indiatimes. A user can manually get his mail protected from Spam but it can create problems as many times, safe mails get into the Spam folder,” Goel added.
“Mails are marked as Spams on the basis of subject, sender, receiver, word and size of the mail. English is accepted globally so mails in any other foreign language are not marked as Spams. But users can manually mark unwanted words as “report Spam” and the mail containing such words would be automatically sent to the Spam folder,” said Rajveer, a software developer.
Sharad Natani, a management student, said, “I receive more Spam than normal mail. Now Spammers are using Hindi slangs. Earlier I use to check every Spam and my Spam folder was always full. I have formatted my computer twice because of it.”
In absolute numbers
1978 - An e-mail Spam is sent to 600 addresses.
1994 - First large-scale Spam sent to 6000 newsgroup, reaching millions of people.
2005 - (June) 30 billion per day
2006 - (June) 55 billion per day
2006 - (December) 85 billion per day
2007 - (February) 90 billion per day
Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group estimates that 80-85% of incoming mail is "abusive email", as of the last quarter of 2005.
According to Sophos, the major sources of Spam in the second quarter of 2007 (April to June) were the United States (the origin of 19.6% of Spam messages), followed by China (8.4%) and South Korea (6.5%). When grouped by continents, Spam comes mostly from Asia (35,2%), Europe (28,5%) and North America (24,2%). Overall volume has increased 9% in the last year
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