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34 Specific Types of Spam
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James John Farmer accessdate = 2007-01-05 date = 27 December 2003
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FAQ work = An FAQ for newsadminnet-abuseemail Part 3: Understanding NANAE publisher = spamfaqnet
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http://wwwrhyolitecom/anti-spam/you-might-behtml#spam-fighter-4
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You Might Be An Anti-Spam Kook If
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2007-01-05 date = 25 November 2006 publisher = Rhyolite Software, LLC
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http://wwwspamcopnet/fom-serve/cache/14html
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On what type of email should I (not) use SpamCop
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2007-01-05 format = FAQ work = SpamCop FAQ publisher = IronPort Systems, Inc
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http://spamabusenet/overview/whatisspamshtml
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What is spam accessdate = 2007-01-05
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Scott Hazen Mueller work = Information about spam publisher = spamabusenet
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http://wwwmonkeyscom/spam-defined/
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Spam Defined accessdate = 2007-01-05 date = 22 December 2002 publisher = Infinite Monkeys & Co LLC
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folder of spam messages.]]
From the beginning of the internet, sending of junk e-mail has been prohibited, Gary Thuerk, who sent the first e-mail ad, in 1978, to 600 people, was reprimanded and told not to do it again.
Opening Pandora's In-Box enforced by ISPs , although some countries have passed laws against spam, especially in Europe and Australia.
As the recipient directly bears the cost of delivery, storage, and processing, one could regard spam as the electronic equivalent of "postage-due" junk mail. Due to the low cost of sending unsolicited e-mail and the potential profit entailed only enforcing an opt-in law will stop junk e-mail. "Today, much of the spam volume is sent by career criminals and malicious hackers who won't stop until they're all rounded up and put in jail."
CAUCE accessed July 13, 2007
Spam is rarely sent by well-known companies, and is quickly regretted; spam from these sources is sometimes called ''mainsleaze''
1. A widely-known instance of spamming by a large corporation was
Kraft Foods ' marketing of its
Gevalia coffee brand.
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Spammers may engage in deliberate
Fraud to send out their messages. Spammers often use false names, addresses, phone numbers, and other contact information to set up "disposable" accounts at various Internet service providers. They also often use falsified or stolen
Credit Card numbers to pay for these accounts. This allows them to move quickly from one account to the next as the host ISPs discover and shut down each one.
Spam is also a medium for fraudsters to scam users to enter personal information on fake Web sites using e-mail forged to look like it is from a bank or other organization such as Paypal. This is known as
Phishing .
Senders may go to great lengths to conceal the origin of their messages. Large companies may hire another firm to send their messages so that complaints or blocking of email falls on a third party. Others engage in
Spoof ing of e-mail addresses (much easier than
IP Address Spoofing ). The e-mail protocol (
SMTP ) has no authentication by default, so the spammer can pretend to originate a message apparently from any e-mail address. To prevent this, some ISPs and domains require the use of
SMTP-AUTH , allowing positive identification of the specific account from which an e-mail originates.
Senders cannot completely spoof e-mail delivery chains (the 'Received' header), since the receiving mailserver records the actual connection from the last mailserver's IP address. To counter this, some spammers forge additional delivery headers to make it appear as if the e-mail had previously traversed many legitimate servers.
Spoofing can have serious consequences for legitimate e-mail users. Not only can their e-mail inboxes get clogged up with "undeliverable" e-mails in addition to volumes of spam, they can mistakenly be identified as a spammer. Not only may they receive irate e-mail from spam victims, but (if spam victims report the e-mail address owner to the ISP, for example) a naïve ISP may terminate their service for spamming.
Spammers frequently seek out and make use of vulnerable third-party systems such as
Open Mail Relay s and open
Proxy Server s. SMTP forwards mail from one server to another—mail servers that ISPs run commonly require some form of
Authentication to ensure that the user is a customer of that ISP. Open relays, however, do not properly check who is using the mail server and pass all mail to the destination address, making it harder to track down spammers.
Increasingly, spammers use networks of malware-infected PCs (
Zombies ) to send their spam.
Zombie networks are also known as
Botnet s (such zombifying malware is known as a ''bot'', short for
Robot ). In June 2006, an estimated 80% of e-mail spam were sent by zombie PCs, an increase of 30% from the prior year. An estimated 55 billion e-mail spam were sent each day in June 2006, an increase of 25 billion per day from June 2005.
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Spam is growing, with no signs of abating. The amount of spam users see in their mailboxes is just the tip of the iceberg, since spammers' lists often contain a large percentage of invalid addresses and many spam filters simply delete or reject "obvious spam".
- 2005 - (June) 30 billion per day
- 2006 - (June) 55 billion per day
- 2006 - (December) 85 billion per day
- 2007 - (February) 90 billion per day
Origin or source of spam refers to the geographical location of the computer from which the spam is sent; it is not the country where the spammer resides, nor the country that hosts the spamvertised site.
Due to the international nature of spam, often the spammer, the hijacked spam-sending computer, the spamvertised server, and the user target of the spam are all located in different countries.
