What is spam in e-mail and how to deal with it

Did you receive emails with promotional content? Yes? Then you know what spam is. Almost all postal services that are in the world today, allocate a huge amount of money to combat spam. Developers create a variety of programs and scripts that can detect advertisements and block them, as well as their senders.

Despite this, such letters continue to come. Some of them are really determined and automatically transferred to the "Spam" folder (it is already available from every mail provider); The rest can really come to the section "Inbox".

More about what spam is in e-mail, why it is sent and how to deal with it, we'll tell you in this article.

What is spam?

In general, the word "spam" comes from the name of a hot meat (from pork and beef), the name of which was used in the comedy series in 1971. According to the idea of the writer, in one cafe visitors were so aggressively advertised this product that they literally continued to use the word "SPAM". The point was precisely the constant, excessive and at the same time aggressive repetition of the said word.

Today, automated mass mailings of advertising correspondence are called "spam". Unlike simple advertising, such a mailing does not have a target audience - it is sent to a huge number of people without a specific goal: simply hoping that some small part of the addressees will be interested in the offer.

In the era of electronic technology, we all know what spam is. In e-mail, SMS, in social networks and even in ordinary mailboxes, we can find a lot of messages that are sent on behalf of certain companies offering their services.

Spam is very intrusive, and sometimes even dangerous to the recipient. We will discuss this in more detail below. In the meantime, more specifically about those who benefit from such mailings.

Who sends out spam?

As already noted, we receive a lot of non-targeted advertising offers. All these letters (spam) are most often in the interests of the companies they advertise (suppliers of goods and services, which are described in the proposal). In some cases, spam-mailing can be carried out in order to achieve the opposite effect - to scare off the consumer in order to annoy the competitor.

Of course, if in your mailbox you find a letter with the advertisement of a shoe store, this does not mean that the store itself is making such a dispatch. Most likely, messages were sent from a special server designed for such purposes. And the store owner could just order a similar newsletter.

Another situation is when you are trying to send spam with a request to transfer money or containing some kind of fraudulent offer. For example, these are all well-known "letters of happiness" that your distant relative has left millions of dollars as an inheritance, and you are required to pay commissions of $ 200-300. This type of letter is sent, most likely, just a group of people who have access to the necessary tools (for example, it can be a spam program, a server and a mailing list).

What is advertised?

If we talk about what is advertised in spam emails, then this is a huge number of options. The newsletter can promote a particular company, product or service, online store or service. In this case, of course, spammers try to act secretly, so as not to harm the service provider. For example, official companies will not deal with spam, since it is illegal. To promote products, they can use a site-pad or a dummy store.

In other cases, spam may contain links to various sites containing viruses; Programs that can harm your computer, pornographic materials, various requests from front people. Such mailings are conducted just by groups of people who simply earn money in illegal ways. It can even be hackers - specialists with special knowledge in this field.

Is it profitable?

According to unofficial research, annually spammers earn millions of dollars in their activities. They advertise adult sites, stores with pharmaceuticals, send out viruses and various fraudulent messages to millions of people. Imagine that while many are aware of what spam is in e-mail and how much it can be harmful to the recipient, people continue to believe the written and send money, buy access to sites, tablets and even install programs.

If you give a specific answer, then yes - spam is very beneficial. Otherwise, they would not be engaged. Simply the other side of the coin is the question of how difficult it is to send the newsletter in terms of money costs. After all, even an amateur understands that the spam program (or some special script) and the server from which the dispatch will be conducted, as well as a host of other technical nuances, are additional costs that need to be recouped from the profits from sent messages. Therefore, to say that spam is a simple occupation, it is impossible. Many people are involved in this, but only a small part of them manage to earn really big money here.

Spam email

In the email spam appeared, probably the earliest. It was, of course, a particularly effective tool at the very beginning of the development of Internet technologies. Then still people did not know what spam is, what to do with incoming letters, that there is no inheritance, and you can forget about money sent to the specified details.

Later, of course, the problem of spam took care of the mail services. They were forced to introduce the first mechanisms to block spammers, which were later successfully solved. For the past few years, the anti-spam industry has been working: those who make mailings are coming up with something new; And the task of mail services is to create a filter that prevents mail from getting to users.

With the phenomenon referred to in this article, all modern Internet companies are struggling, including Yandex. Spam has become the main enemy, so the search engine developers team is constantly improving the methods of selecting advertising letters for several years now. Their success so far is variable, since unwanted correspondence continues to come.

Spam in other services and services

In addition to mail, there are many other services on which spammers are trafficked. In fact, these are various forums, blogs, regular sites, message boards, social networks, abandoned resources, which are no longer being worked on. This shows that, despite the fight against such a phenomenon, no one knows how to remove spam.

Unless you can learn the experience of the most advanced players in the IT market - the largest social networks (Facebook, Twitter), where spam is constantly detected and removed. And then - even there you can meet a huge amount of hidden (and not very) spam.

How to fight?

Just the question arises: how to deal with such a negative phenomenon? Is it possible to make spam in the browser no longer annoy ordinary users, who, for the most part, are not interested in the offered products?

It is necessary to fight obsessive messages, but it is still impossible to eradicate such a concept as spam. The most effective tools are simply automatic and manual control over what users send to each other, as well as some limitations with which you can reduce the growth in the number of spam messages.

For example, in the same Gmail there are filters that reject messages that contain links that are sent to different people in large volumes. Such accounts will be blocked very quickly, and spam messages will not reach the addressees.

The problem with this technique is the many variations in the forms of spam. Roughly speaking, it can be sent not only in the form of links and not from one account. In fact, attackers can create many accounts on different IP-addresses in such a way as to hide their real intentions. It will be more difficult for the postal service to identify such activities.

What measures are being taken?

In addition to simple drawing up of filters, mail services conduct a lot of innovative developments, allowing to recognize spam in one form or another. With their help, users will not think about how to remove spam, and this will make the work with mail much more convenient.

However, no one knows how such solutions work, why they still miss obsessive advertising messages. Simply in the section of technological news, large postal providers sometimes publish information about the test of new security mechanisms; And in time you can see how the number of spam messages actually decreases. The working methods of such mechanisms remain a secret.

Spam has come to you. What to do?

If you see in your mailbox an unwanted letter of clearly advertising (or fraudulent) nature - do not panic. All you need to do is click the "Mark as spam" button (if your mail provider has one) in order to inform the service about the advertising nature of the message. If you do not have the "This spam" button - just delete the email.

In no case do not go to the links indicated there and do not download the attached files! Do not forget what spam is in e-mail! It can be a program that can steal your data or infect your computer.

Responsibility for mailing

If suddenly you would like to try to deal with spam mailing yourself, we will hasten to warn that this is a punishable activity, including in our country. Therefore, we do not recommend trying.