How to stop spamming

In
this post I will try my best to give
every possible information about
the spam and will also tell you about
how to combat spam.
What is SPAM?
Spam is the abuse of electronic
messaging systems (including most
broadcast media, digital delivery
systems) to send unsolicited bulk
messages indiscriminately. Most
widely recognized form of spam is
email spam.
Where do these SPAM come
from?
These spam come only from
spammers and never from a
legitimate user or a company. These
spammers send a single email to
hundreds (some times thousands
or millions) of email addresses at a
time. They either send it manually
or use spambots to automate the
process of spamming.
Why do spammers SPAM?
The main goal of spammers is to
send the spam (unsolicited bulk
messages) to as many people as
possible in order to make profit. For
example, John builds a small
website to sell an ebook which gives
information about weight loss. In
order to make sales he needs
publicity for his website. Instead of
spending money on advertising,
John decides to create an email
which contains information about
his site along with it’s link and send
this email to say 100 email
addresses in his contact list. If 1
person out of hundred buy this
book john gets $10. What if he
sends this email to 1000s of email
addresses. He gets $100. Imagine, if
he sends this email to 1 Million email
addresses he gets $100000.
Now I hope you understood the
idea behind spamming. So in order
to make money, spammers send
their advertising emails to as many
people as possible without
respecting the recipient ’s privacy.
From where do SPAMmers get
my email address?
On the Internet there exists many
sites who collect the email IDs of
people and sell them to spammers
in bulk. Most often, people sign up
for monthly newsletters and take up
surveys. This is the time where
these scam sites get their email
addresses. Also many spammers
collect email addresses by using
spambots. These spambots collect
email addresses from the Internet in
order to build mailing lists. Such
spambots are web crawlers that can
gather email addresses from Web
sites, newsgroups, forums, special-
interest group (SIG) postings, and
chat-room conversations.
Spammers also use the trick of
creating Hoax Emails for gathering
a huge list of email IDs. For
example, a spammer sends a hoax
email which says “Forward
this Message to Help Severely
Burned Child ”. This email claims that
11 cents will be donated to the child’s
family every time the message is
sent to others. Most of the people
believe this and start forwarding this
hoax email to all of the IDs in their
contact list. In this way the email
spreads rapidly and eventually
when it reaches the creator
(spammer), the spammer gets a
huge list of valid email addresses in
the email header. When you get
these kind of hoax emails, you can
see for yourself in the email header
which contains a huge list of email
addresses of all those people to
whom the email is being forwarded
to. This is one of the effective
methods used by spammers to
gather email addresses.
Is SPAMming legal?
Spamming is completely illegal. Yet
it is really difficult to stop spammers
from spamming since they keep
moving from one hosting company
to another after getting banned. This
makes it practically impossible to
catch spammers and prosecute
them.
How to protect my email
account from getting
SPAMmed?
The following methods can be used
to combat email spam.
1. Use spam filters for your email
account. If you ’re using email
services like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail
etc. then spam filters are used by
defaut. Each spam filter has
it ’s algorithm to detect spam emails
and will automatically move them to
SPAM folder. This keeps your inbox
free from spam. However some
spam emails become successful to
make their way into the inbox by
successfully bypassing the filters.
2. Do not post your email address in
public forums, user comments and
chat-rooms. Give your email
address only to trustworthy
websites while signing up for
newsletters.
3. While taking up online surveys
and filling up feedback forms, it is
better not to give your personal
email address. Instead singup for a
dummy email account and use this
for surveys and feedback forms.
4. While posting your contact email
address on your website use this
format: emailaddress [at]
yoursite.com instead of
emailaddress@yoursite.com.
This protects your email address
from being indexed by spambots.
5. Do not respond to hoax
messages. When you receive a
hoax email, avoid forwarding it to
your friends. Examples of hoax
messages can be found at
www.hoax-slayer.com. If you
really want to forward it to your
friends, make sure that you use
“ Bcc” (blind carbon copy) option to
send the email. This will hide all the
email IDs to which the mail is
forwarded to.
I hope this helps. Pass your
suggestions and feedback via
comments.