Gadgetory

ah the grilled spam sandwich one of life's little pleasures at least according to some people anyway but while that weird canned meat product is beloved by millions worldwide something that's not so lovable is email spam which for years has clogged people's inboxes worse than real spam will clog your arteries so why exactly is spam so prolific and what have we done to try and fight it well it probably isn't surprising that people found ways to take advantage of a means of sending the same message to tons of people electronically long before of the mainstream internet was invented the first spam message was actually sent all the way back in 1978 over the old ARPANET a US military network that was a predecessor to the modern Internet although the sender was promptly rebuked that technique sadly doesn't work today to stop spam spam messages continued to proliferate through news groups users who sometimes people say named these sorts of messages span after a famous Monty Python sketch but it really exploded in the mid to late 1990s as more and more people started using email anyone who's ever sent a message to more than one person before knows how easy quick and cheap it's to send the same message to a large number of people so easy in fact that at one point it was estimated that over 90% of email traffic was spam although more recent estimates have indicated that the number is now closer to 50% still a ton an email and that's not counting the spam that is popping up on places like say for example social networking sites dating sites video sites and the infamous comment sections of the aforementioned places but even though sending lots of emails is easy how the heck do spammers get their hands on so many people's email addresses often spammers will actually just test millions of random addresses that contain dictionary words or common names and numbers to see which ones work or they can use BOTS to crawl the public web and look for email addresses that people have posted in various places say for example on a forum dubious advertisements can also lead people to malicious websites that convince them to sign up for stuff using an email address which is then harvested after a spammer compiles a large list of working email addresses they can actually make matters worse by not only emailing all those people but by selling the list to other spammers and then suddenly you've got a deluge of emails asking you to buy pills to enlarge a certain part of your Anatomy say for example your nose but Linus I just don't get why these people send out spam at all doesn't everyone just delete spam and move on to the next real email well almost everyone does the response rate for spam messages is indeed extremely low so spammers use tools such as dedicated servers and botnets of infected computers to send out as many pieces of spam as they possibly can so even if only one in a million people is gullible enough to believe they can buy a real Rolex for the price of a cheeseburger it still leads to a pretty good-sized profit for the scammers back to remember they're super cheap to send out so then how have we tried to fight back against this crap Vilanch of junk mail well most of the popular email services today employ some kind of spam filter which scans emails for suspicious words formatting and deceptive headers the part of the email containing address information and checks emails against a known blacklist of spam addresses to keep that stuff from reaching your inbox numerous countries have also tried to legislate against spammers as well and although these efforts haven't been extraordinarily effective several more notorious spammers have served prison time for defrauding people but with that said perhaps the best thing you can do is watch who you're giving your email address to unless that is to say you enjoy getting business propositions from exiled Nigerian royalty speaking of payments online except actually in this case Braintree if you're building a mobile app for example and you're searching for a simple payment solution there Braintree V dot zero SDK could be the answer to your woes it's one amazingly simple integration that gives you every way to pay developers around the world have embraced the Braintree V zero SDK as the easiest way to add secure mobile payments to their apps and websites Braintree allows you to accept Apple pay Android pay PayPal venmo credit cards even Bitcoin and if something new pops up Braintree is going to be working on supporting that too they're used by uber Airbnb and github so you'll know that if you're you know say for example planning to become the next goober their solution is scalable and integrating it into your app is as easy as inserting a few lines of code although if you're having trouble they will help you out with that so try out the sandbox learn more about Braintree and get your first fifty thousand dollars in transactions be free over at Braintree payments comm slash tech quickie thanks for watching guys if you liked the video hit the like button if you disliked it hit the dislike button if you like spam hit the like button and it was the least liked video ever on tech week you also if you have suggestions for future videos on fast as possible go ahead and leave those in the comments below and we'll try to get to them