Spamming Explained

Yo subscribe to WebRampage via RSS feeds or email. That way you'll get all the updates and everything.

Millions of spam emails are sent out everyday worldwide. Everyone gets spam and I’m pretty sure that you also get spam once in a while, at least. You might wonder how this spam gets to your inbox. Well the answer is pretty simple, spammers send them to you. But how do the spammers get your email address?

Well it’s pretty obvious that spammers would need a huge list of email addresses to start spamming. First of all, there are companies who sell millions of valid email addresses. Thinking where those companies get the email addresses? Well they have programs that surf the web looking specifically for the telltale “@” sign that tells them it is an email address. These programs are called spambots. Then there are sites set up to get email addresses. Such as a sites asks you to type in your email address to win $1 million. Most people would have an idea that this is a spam but sometimes they still give it a shot.

Another source of these email addresses would be chat rooms, newsgroups, etc. where new users often leave their email addresses. Then there are also sites that sell email addresses to those companies. Like when you are buying a product, it might say that please uncheck this check box if you do not wish to receive emails from our partners or sponsors. If you did not uncheck it or misread then your email address would be sold.

Spammers also attack email servers of large email hosting companies like Hotmail, Yahoo!, AOL, etc. And one of the common attacks is a dictionary attack where a spambot connects to the email server and submits a lot of randomly generated email address then checks for valid ones. Hotmail didn’t have any protection against these attacks back in 2003 and so people used to get a lot more spam on Hotmail than now.

After a list of email addresses is created spammers use programs to send spam emails and they use their own servers to do this or use zombie computers to do this so that they cannot be traced and blocked.

Well if you want to stop getting spam emails then you could do some basic stuff such as put a contact form on your site rather than just putting your email address and never give your email address to strangers or leave your email addresses in chat rooms, newsgroups or put them in suspicious forms.

If have a spammer gets your email address then he/she would probably share it other spammers and leading endless spam into your inbox. So think again before sharing your email address!