Have you received emails with promotional content? Yes? Then you know what spam is. Almost all mail services that exist in the world today, allocate a huge amount of money to fight spam. Developers create a variety of programs and scripts that allow you to detect advertising messages and block them, as well as their senders.
Despite this, similar letters keep coming. Some of them are indeed detected and automatically transferred to the Spam folder (each mail provider already has it); the rest may indeed come to the Inbox section.
We will explain in more detail about what spam in email is, why it is sent and how to deal with it.
What is spam?
In general, the word "spam" comes from the name of spicy minced meat (from pork and beef), the name of which was used in the comedy series in 1971. According to the scriptwriter, in one cafe visitors were so aggressively advertised this product that they literally didn’t stop using the word “SPAM”. The meaning was precisely in the constant, excessive and at the same time aggressive repetition of the indicated word.
Today, “spam” refers to automated mass mailings of advertising correspondence. Unlike simple advertising, this newsletter does not have a target audience - it is sent to a huge number of people without a specific purpose: just hoping that some small part of the recipients 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 can be very intrusive, and sometimes even dangerous for the recipient. We will talk more about this later. In the meantime, more specifically about those who benefit from such mailings.
Who sends spam?
As already noted, we get a lot of inappropriate advertising offers. All these letters (spam) are most often in the interests of the companies by which they are advertised (suppliers of goods and services that are described in the offer). In some cases, spam can be carried out in order to achieve the opposite effect - to scare away the consumer in order to annoy the competitor.
Of course, if in your mailbox you find a letter advertising a shoe store, this does not mean that the store itself does this newsletter. Most likely, the messages were sent from a special server designed for such purposes. And the store owner could simply order such a newsletter.
Another situation when they try to send you spam with a request to transfer money or an offer containing some kind of obviously fraudulent nature. For example, these are the well-known “letters of happiness” that some distant rich relative left millions of dollars as an inheritance, and you are required to pay commissions in the amount of $ 200-300. Most likely, a group of people with access to the necessary tools sends this type of letter (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. A newsletter can promote a specific company, product or service, online store or service. In this case, of course, spammers try to act covertly so as not to harm the service provider. For example, official companies will not engage in spam, as this is illegal. To promote goods, they can use a gasket site 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 dummies. Such mailings are carried out just by groups of people who simply make money in illegal ways. It can even be hackers - specialists with special knowledge in this area.
Is it profitable?
According to unofficial studies, spammers earn millions of dollars annually from their activities. They advertise adult sites, drug stores, send out viruses and misleading messages to millions of people. Imagine that, despite the fact that many are aware of what spam in email is and how harmful it can be to the recipient, people continue to believe what is written and send money, buy access to websites, tablets and even install programs.
If you give a specific answer, then yes - spam is very beneficial. Otherwise, they would not be involved. Just the other side of the coin is the question of how difficult it is to send out in terms of cash costs. After all, even a layman understands that the spam program (or some special script) and the server from which the mailing will be conducted, as well as a host of other technical nuances, are additional costs that need to be recouped due to the profit from the messages sent. Therefore, you can’t say that spam is a simple activity. Many people are engaged in this, but only a small part manages to earn really big money here.
Email Spam
Spam appeared in the email, probably the first. Of course, he was a particularly effective tool at the very beginning of the development of Internet technologies. At that time, people still did not know what spam was, what to do with the letters received, that there really was no inheritance, and you could forget about the money sent by the specified details.
Later, of course, email services were concerned about spam. They were forced to introduce the first mechanisms for blocking spammers, which were later successfully solved. Over the past few years, the anti-spam industry has been working like this: those who do mailings come up with something new; and the task of mail services is to create a filter that will prevent letters from reaching users.
With the phenomenon referred to in this article, all modern Internet companies, including Yandex, are struggling. Spam from them has become the main enemy, so the search engine development team has been constantly improving the methods for selecting advertising letters for several years now. Their success is still variable, as unwanted correspondence continues to come.
Spam in other services
In addition to mail, there are many other services on which spammers hunt. In fact, these are various forums, blogs, regular sites, message boards, social networks, abandoned resources on which work is no longer underway. This indicates that, despite the fight against this phenomenon, no one knows how to remove spam.
Unless you can learn from the experience of the most advanced technology 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 so) 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 stop annoying ordinary users who, for the most part, are not interested in the products offered?
You need to deal with intrusive messages, but it’s still impossible to eradicate a concept like spam. The most effective tools are simply automatic and manual control over what users send to each other, as well as some restrictions that can help reduce the growth in the number of spam messages.
For example, Gmail also has filters that reject messages containing links that are sent to different people in large volumes. Such accounts will be blocked very quickly, and spam emails will not reach the recipients.
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 at 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 the simple preparation of filters, email services are many innovative developments that allow you to recognize spam in one form or another. With their help, users will not think about how to remove spam, and this will make working with mail much more convenient.
However, no one knows how such solutions work, why they still miss intrusive advertising messages. It’s just that in the technology news section, large mail providers sometimes publish information about the test of new protection mechanisms; and over time, you’ll notice 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 an unwanted letter of clearly advertising (or fraudulent) nature in your inbox, do not panic. All that needs to be done is to click the “Mark as spam” button (if your mail provider has one) to inform the service about the advertising nature of the message. If you don’t have the “This is spam” button, simply delete the letter.
In no case do not follow the links indicated there and do not download the attached files! Don’t forget what spam is in email! It may be a program that can steal your data or infect your computer.
Responsibility for the newsletter
If suddenly you would like to try spamming yourself, we’ll hurry to warn you that this is a criminally punishable activity, including in our country. Therefore, we do not recommend trying.