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What Is Spam Email?

Article By Cameron Savage

Definition of Spam

A "spam" Email is generally defined as an unsolicited bulk commercial mailing.

A message written for, and mailed to, one individual that is known to the sender is not spam, and a reply to an Email is not spam.

Is all Junk Email Spam?

A good question. Many people consider all unsolicited Email to be spam. The target of this article is not the business owner that uses Opt-In Email lists and honors the requests for removal. Nor is it targeting the small business owner who is trying to promote his/her products and services to a local community and only sends out Email to a targeted market and generally only does it one time.

What this article does target is the professional spammer. These people do not have any respect for the online community, nor do they have any respect for the consumer. These people would rather 'get rich quick' than work for their money.

What are Spammers trying to accomplish?

  1. Sell a product or service directly.
  2. Name recognition. - Many companies use spam Email in order to get a high level of name recognition.

Does it pay for them to spam?

Yes. It pays them quite well. Unsolicited bulk Commercial Email is very profitable. The reason it is so profitable is because it is very inexpensive to send out millions upon millions of Emails a week and they can and do send out millions a day let alone a week.

Example:

Assume the following:

A company that uses spam tactics is selling a product at a one time fee of $6.95 USD. The product costs them $2.95 USD and you pay $3.95 USD Shipping. The Actual Shipping cost is only $1.00 USD.

They buy an Email list with 30 million confirmed Email Addresses for $300.00 USD. They then send out 1 Million Email Messages a day for 30 days and have a conversion rate of .01%.

That means that 3000 people have now bought their product at $6.95 + $3.95 shipping and handling which comes to: $32,700.00 Gross Profit and a $20,550.00 Net Profit(Assuming this is a one person operation).

That might not seem like a lot but now that company has 3000 Email Addresses of people who will purchase via spam Email. This information is extremely valuable and in a few months they will be able to create a list and sell it to another company.

How do they obtain the Email lists?

There are several ways for a spam based organization to obtain Email Addresses.

Harvesting Email Addresses from Websites.

Purchasing Opt-In Email Addresses from companies that offer for you to receive special offers from their "affiliates".

Harvesting Email Addresses from Newsgroups.

Randomly generating Email Addresses based off of domain names.

Writing programs with a perceived benefit to you that copies your Email Address book and sends it back to the spammer.

Your friends and yourself. When you forward a funny Email Message from friend to friend it retains every person's Email Address. A spammer will eventually get a copy of this Email and can be very confident in the fact that those Email Addresses are all valid.

What can you do to help reduce spam?

Never respond to a spam Email.

Never buy anything from a spam Email. If you see something in a spam Email that you would like to buy look for the website address for the company and type it into your website browser manually.

Never Use your real Email Address when you post to a newsgroup.

Set-Up a Junk Email Address and use it to sign up at Websites. Only use your real Email Address with companies that you trust and with your friends/associates.

Never Forward an Email Address - Copy the portion of the Email you want someone to see into a new Email Message.

Never sign up with sites that promise to remove your name from spam lists. Generally these websites are designed to do one thing: Collect your Email Address in order to sell it to spammers. The few sincere sites that offer this service are almost always ignored by true spammers.

Use your favorite Email reading program and set up filters that allow you to automatically delete Spam Email Messages before you ever see them. If your Email program does not support filters, get one that does. both Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express support limited filtering.

Use an Email Hosting provider that has a clear Anti-Spam policy and uses spam filtering techniques. If your Email hosting provider does not have a spam policy find out why. Switch to a hosting provider that does have one if they can not give you a link to their spam policy.

Report Spam Email. There are many organizations on the internet that can help you report spam one is: http://spamcop.net/.

Report Fraudulent Email:
Most bulk Email is NOT fraudulent.

An example of a fraudulent Email would be a pyramid scheme.
For specific examples please see our Scam Email Article .
In the United States you can report fraudulent Email to the FTC at: uce@ftc.gov .

Do These Techniques always Work?

Unfortunately they do not always work. Spammers have become a community and a profession all unto themselves. Many have gone so far as to set up their own Internet Service Companies. Obtaining large blocks of IP addresses and using their own Email servers in order to circumvent legitimate ISPs efforts to curtail spam.

In an attempt to stop this behavior ISPs have started blocking the spammers, preventing them from interacting with ISP's Email servers. The problem with this is that it can and does stop some legitimate Email from reaching its destination.