How Spammers Obtain Your Email Address And Why They Send Spam
Monday, November 06, 2006
You probably know that Spam is unsolicited and undesired e-mail
message. Spammers are the people who send Spam. Spam is a
serious problem. It is important today as never before because
almost every other email message we receive is Spam. So, the
question arises how spammers get your email address and why
they send you Spam. Spammers can obtain your email address in
three ways.
One way is to guess a mailbox name for a publicly listed domain
name. Many organizations have the email addresses where the
first part of the email address is a general word such as
"info", "sales", "accounts", "support", etc. People often use
the email addresses beginning with their first name, for
example, John, Sandra, Julia. Spammers simply put the first
names before the @ symbol followed by a domain name, and get
possible email addresses.
Secondly, spammers can gather email addresses from the
Internet. They use programs that search web pages looking for
email addresses. If there is your contact email address in your
web site, or if the email address is embedded into your profile,
your email address will be obtained by spammers.
The third way to get your email address is to buy email lists.
Some dishonest companies can make money by selling the
customer's information to spammers. Spammers can also bribe
unscrupulous employees of companies to get a copy of the email
list.
Once spammers got a list of the victims' email addresses, they
start spamming. They do it to make money. In general, there are
two kinds of spam messages:
1.Offering trashy and fraudulent goods or services (e.g.
Viagra, Cialis, medications, fake Rolexes, software programs,
etc.)
2.Stock scams working on "Pump and dump" schemes. Spammers
encourage you to invest in a particular company's stock, in
order to quickly inflate its value and enable the spammers to
make a fast profit.
By sending their undesired messages spammers have for an object
to contact thousands or even millions people in the hope to hit
one or a few dolts who actually will buy their crappy products.
No dolts, no spam. But out of a million people, you will always
find one or two.
Most of the Internet protocols that computers use to talk to
each other are anonymous. Your email server thinks that any
email server connecting to it over the Internet is giving its
name properly and that the email it sends is legitimate.
Spammers abuse this trust relationship to send you their
garbage. The Internet protocols cannot be changed in a moment
so we need another solution to the problem of spam.
Legislative attempts produced no effect. It's not easy to track
a spammer located in USA sending spam using a mail server from
Russia to mailboxes in Australia. Spammers are also known to
use Trojans to hijack one's computer and make that person send
spam on behalf of the spammer. The "victim" doesn't even guess
about it. These people would be caught up in any comprehensive
Spam legislation.
However that may be you can take some measures to protect your
inbox against spam flow by yourself. There is a wide choice of
anti-spam products available on the Internet. You only have to
choose the right one to block Spam before it reaches your
inbox. There is no guarantee that you will get absolutely no
Spam but at least you will reduce its amount.
About The Author: Author is a technical expert associated with
development of computer software like AATools, G-Lock EasyMail,
Spam Blocker http://www.glocksoft.com/sc/ More information can
be found at Anti Spam Filter Resources
http://www.glocksoft.net/sc/
posted by Dennis Cheesman @ 5:28 AM,
