Business Articles
What is Spam and how do they get your email address?
The definition of spam when applied to e-mail is
Unsolicited Bulk E-mail (UCE), e-mail that has been sent in bulk to recipients
who have not given permission for the message to be sent to them. Spam is also
known as junk e-mail.
Spamming is flooding the Internet with many
copies of the same message to multiple addresses. Spam messages are almost
always commercial or fraudulent messages, and are quite often sent with false
return address information.
A rapidly growing form of spam is what is known
as a Phishing scam. These are messages sent in bulk to a random list of people,
claiming to be from a company they may trust – such as a bank or e-bay. These
Phishing e-mails will look absolutely genuine to even the most experience
Internet user, but will in fact be linking through to a fraudsters website with
the aim of stealing personal information from you.
Spammers quite often fake the “From” address of
a message, that way the message will not be returned to them in the case of any
problems.
Combating spam can be very difficult. Spammers
often use networks of computer in foreign countries to avoid local anti-spam
laws, or even make use of hijacked networks of computers that have been
infected with virus or Trojans.
How do the Spammers get
your E-mail Address?
If you have an e-mail address then you will be a
target of spam. Unfortunately that is a fact of today’s Internet. There is
little you can do to avoid ending up on a list of targets for spammers.
The first way a spammer (Or the person who sells
the list to the spammer) gathers their list of addresses is to scan websites.
They have built automated tools, which scan through web pages with the sole
purpose of gathering e-mail addresses. The e-mails they gather then get added
to a database, which may then be sold on to other spammers.
These automated tools are able to search through
search engines such as Google to find new sites - in the same way as you would.
Their e-mail address collecting tools then read through every page on
the website making a list of any address they find. This includes any
public forums you may of posted a message to, any online notice you
may have posted or even on your own personal home page.
And then there are some websites that ask you to
register before giving access to certain aspects or to enable you to order a
product. Some of these websites may not be as careful with your e-mail address
as you would like, some may sell on their mailing list to other parties or they
simply be hacked into with your details being stolen.
The final and probably most worrying method is
that the spammers will simply guess your e-mail address. The spammers are able
to create a list of domain names (The last part of your e-mail address, e.g.
@yourISP.com) and from this list they will just fire off thousands of random
names.
So they would e-mail jonh.smith@yourISP.com,
joe.jones@yourISP.com and so on. Because they are able to send out millions of
spam messages each day, it doesn’t matter to them that 90% of
these addresses do not end get delivered – the 10% that do is
more than enough.
In conclusion there is not much you can do to avoid ending up on a spammers e-mail list. Even if you never tell anyone your e-mail address, chances are the spammers will guess it eventually!
For further information on reducing Spam in your inbox visit www.ClearMyMail.com - The guaranteed solution to spam e-mail
All articles reproduced with permission from This Is Your Business