Surely each of us, opening his mailbox, found there colorful leaflets containing information of an advertising nature. There you were offered to visit some resort, earn a million, be cured of the evil eye, etc.
And only a few, having read these leaflets, found them useful for themselves. It is this distribution of information that is called unsolicited advertising, spam mailing or simply spam.
The term "spam" refers primarily to emails. Quite often, almost all e-mail that recipients did not request are referred to as spam. Recently, experts have studied all types of spam, as a result of which they concluded that if all unwanted or advertising emails are classified as spam, there is a risk of losing business mail.
To better understand what spam is, consider
The main types of spam
Getting to some sites, you can't help but pay attention on pop-up windows with advertisements of a different nature. Such advertising windows generate income for the site author. To increase income, several such pop-up windows are sometimes installed on the site.
The next type of spam is the multiple distribution of messages in newsletters (the so-called “ spam mailing"). Each such mailing list is devoted, as a rule, to some specific topic. The visitor subscribes to it in the hope of receiving information of interest to him. According to the rules of such mailings, advertising messages are allowed, but with certain restrictions (for example, no more than once a week).
However, those who send spam don't care about these rules. They send their advertisements to several mailings every day. At the same time, spammers do not pay any attention to the subject matter. A similar situation with spam mailings can be found in chat rooms, forums and various message boards.
Another type of spam is filling guest books with advertisements... Some resources may contain guest books so that visitors can leave their messages (wishes, comments, suggestions, etc.) in them. However, spammers still manage to leave their "mark" here. The content of the sites does not interest them at all, they just find links to guestbooks and place their advertisements there.
A widespread type of spam is spam comments on articles on websites and blogs. Such comments, as a rule, do not correspond to the topic of the article on the site, but always contain links to extraneous resources. Such links can be contained both in the text of the comment and in the name of the author of the comment.
A distinctive feature of such comments is that they are general in nature and therefore suitable for any site. For example, "this is an interesting article" or "an article is useful, but the algorithm is too complex," and always include a link to your spam page.
Some webmasters try to trick search engines in order to attract visitors to their site. They fill the pages of their resource with invisible text that contains the most popular words (free, download, etc.). Invisible text has the same color as the main background of the site, so the site visitor cannot see it. The user types in the search engine the phrase "free music download", gets on the site of questionable content and, naturally, does not find anything he wants.
However, the most common type of spam is still sending advertising information by e-mail. If your e-mail address is included in the "base for sending spam", then "write - it is gone", because unsubscribing from such mailing is often not so easy, and sometimes it is simply impossible.
How to deal with spam?
How to unsubscribe from spam mailings? This is possible if at the end of the letter there is a link “ cancel subscription"Or" unsubscribe ". By clicking on this link, you can remove your e-mail from the database for sending spam. Unfortunately, such a link may not be available, so let's move on to the second option, how you can "part" with the spam mailing.
Comments on the site containing spam should be removed by the site author manually or using a special plugin.
It is better not to visit sites of questionable content with a bunch of pop-up windows in order to avoid the possibility of picking up viruses on your computer, which any antivirus can miss ("and there is a hole in the old woman").
How to deal with spam in Mail.ru mail?
Before we start fighting spam, I want to emphasize that some important and necessary emails end up in Spam by mistake. Therefore, it is sometimes useful to look into the "Spam" folder, especially if you are waiting for a letter, but it still does not exist.
You can explain to your mail server at mail.ru that such letters should be sent as spam.
Let's figure it out
What is Marked as Spam?
First, you need to select the letter by putting a tick in front of it (number 1 in Fig. 1, click on the picture to enlarge it):
Rice. 1 Mark a message as spam in Mail_ru mail Now click on the "Spam" command (number 2 in Fig. 1). This command will only work on letters that have a checkmark next to them (that is, on selected letters). As a result, the letter will be moved to the "Spam" folder, and the mail server mail.ru will remember the sender as a spammer. This is how the manual “mark as spam” procedure works.
If you wish, you can delete the message from the Spam folder by clicking on the "Clear" command (number 3 in Fig. 1), although after 30 days the messages from the Spam folder will be automatically deleted.
I would like to note that the procedure for sending a letter to Spam may have to be repeated several times. For the mail server from the first (and even from the second) time may not realize that you want to teach him to send letters from this sender directly to Spam. No wonder they say that "repetition is the mother of learning", this rule also applies to mail servers.
How to deal with spam in Yandex.ru mail?
The exact same procedure as described above for Mail.ru, to mark a message as spam, is suitable for the Yandex.ru mailbox.
Rice. 2 Mark a message as spam in Yandex.ru mail To mark an email as Spam, you need
- first put a tick in front of the letter (number 1 in Fig. 2),
- click on the "This is spam" button (number 2 in Fig. 2),
- click on the brush to clear the Spam folder (number 3 in Fig. 2). But this is not necessary, because after 30 days such messages from the "Spam" folder are deleted automatically.
Should you mark your mailing list as Spam if it was useful before?
There are mailings that you yourself subscribed to. For a while, this newsletter was useful and interesting to you. Time passed, the information from the mailing list bored you, tired, not interesting, etc. Should such mailing be marked as Spam?
By marking a mailing list as Spam, you give a signal to the mail server (on Yandex, on Mail.ru, etc.) to send letters from this author to Spam. Therefore, the mail server for ALL Internet users (and not just for you) will send letters from such an author to Spam.
This is NOT always true of other Internet users who may need this information. In such cases, it will be fair and fair to simply unsubscribe from such mailings without marking it as Spam.
What can be concluded from the above?
Spam is information that we did not ask for, did not subscribe to it, it is imposed on us.
Nevertheless, do not forget that "the forest is cut - the chips are flying." Therefore, it is sometimes necessary to look into the Spam folder, because important letters may accidentally appear there.
We fight the rest of the spam to the best of our ability. It is often better to unsubscribe from a mailing list that has become irrelevant than to mark it as spam.
The modern look of the can
Originally, the word "SPAM" originated in Ono, which stands for SPiced hAM (spicy ham) and was a trademark for Hormel Foods canned meat, a spicy minced pork sausage. The term SPAM gained worldwide fame as applied to annoying advertising thanks to the famous sketch of the same name from the famous show "The Flying Circus of Monty Python" (1969) by the comic group Monty Python. The meaning of the sketch boils down to the fact that in one cafe all dishes on the menu contain "SPAM", some even several times. When the protagonist of the sketch, who came to this cafe with his wife, asks to bring him a dish without SPAM, the waitress offers him a dish with a little SPAM. The visitor is outraged, and the choir of Vikings, sitting at the adjacent tables, begins to sing a song of praise "SPAM", after which the sketch plunges into chaos. At the end of the sketch, the hero's wife exclaims: I don't like SPAM! (eng. "I don’t like spam!"). In the credits, the word "SPAM" was also added to the names of the characters. In total, this word is mentioned over a hundred times in the sketch.
The most common types of spam
Advertising
Some legitimate businesses advertise their products or services using spam. They can send it out on their own, but more often they order it to those companies (or individuals) that specialize in this. The appeal of such advertising lies in its relatively low cost and (presumably) large reach of potential customers. Such unsolicited ads can have the opposite effect, causing rejection among recipients, and can even become synonymous with intrusive ads, as happened with ham, they can actually increase sales without causing too much concern to the recipients. The main conditions for mutual benefit for the recipient and the organizer of the mailing are:
- combining the roles of a mailing list organizer and an e-mail service provider;
- improving the quality of the target audience of each specific advertising mailing letter;
- the provider's warning to customers that he will send advertising letters;
- providing convenient tools to block unwanted emails.
Advertising of illegal products
Spam is often used to advertise products that cannot be reported by other means - for example, pornography, counterfeit (fake) goods, drugs with limited circulation, illegally obtained classified information (databases), counterfeit software.
Anti-advertising
"Nigerian Letters"
Spam is sometimes used to trick the recipient of an email into money. The most common method is called "Nigerian letters" because a large number of such letters came from Nigeria. Such a letter contains a message stating that the recipient of the letter can receive a large amount of money in any way, and the sender can help him with this. Then the sender of the letter asks to transfer him some money under the pretext of, for example, paperwork or opening an account. Deceiving this amount is the goal of the scammers.
The narrower name for this type of fraud is scam or scam 419(according to the article number in the Criminal Code of Nigeria).
Phishing
Distribution methods
Spam folder in the mail client window
The largest flow of spam is spread through email (e-mail). Currently, the share of viruses and spam in total email traffic is estimated at 70 to 95 percent. In spam, the most common advertisements for unpopular products: viagra, etc. ...
Anti-spam
Ideology
It is clear that spam brings economic benefits to its customers. This means that users, despite their dislike of spam, still use the services advertised through spam. As long as the return on spam exceeds the cost of overcoming protection, spam will not disappear. Thus, the most reliable way to fight is to refuse services advertised through spam. There are proposals for the use of public condemnation, up to the termination of communication, against persons who buy goods and services advertised by spam.
Other methods are aimed at making it difficult for spammers to access users.
Preventive protection measures
The most reliable way to combat spam is to prevent spammers from finding out your email address. This is a difficult task, but some precautions can be taken.
All address hiding techniques have a fundamental flaw: they create inconvenience not only for alleged spammers, but also for real recipients. In addition, it is often necessary to publish the address - for example, if it is the contact address of the company.
Filtration
Since sales letters tend to be very different from regular correspondence, a common method of dealing with them has become filtering them out of the incoming mail flow. Currently, this method is the main and most widely used one.
Automatic filtering
There is software (software) for automatically detecting spam (so-called spam filters). It can be intended for end users or for use on servers. This software takes two main approaches.
The first is that the content of the letter is analyzed and a conclusion is made whether it is spam or not. A letter classified as spam is separated from other correspondence: it can be marked, moved to another folder, deleted. Such software can run both on the server and on the client's computer. In the latter case, the user does not see the filtered spam, but continues to incur the costs associated with receiving it, since the filtering software receives each letter and only then decides whether to show it or not. On the other hand, if the software runs on a server, the user does not bear the cost of transferring it to his computer.
The second approach is to use various methods to identify the sender as a spammer without looking at the body of the letter. This software can only run on a server that directly receives letters. With this approach, additional traffic is spent only by the server for communicating with spam mail programs (i.e., for refusals to accept letters) and calls to other servers (if any) during scanning.
There are also specialized online services, for example, Kaspersky Lab (Kaspersky Hosted Security service), Outcom (SPAMOREZ), INKAP (Antispam-Post), which provide paid protection against spam. Changing the MX record in the enterprise domain name (see.
Another problem with automatic filtering is that it can mistakenly mark useful messages as spam. Therefore, many mail services and programs, at the request of the user, may not erase those messages that the filter considered spam, but place them in a separate folder.
Automatic filtering methods
Automated filtering software uses statistical analysis of email content to decide whether it is spam. The greatest success has been achieved with algorithms based on Bayes' theorem. For these methods to work, preliminary "training" of the filters is required by sending them manually sorted letters to reveal the statistical features of normal letters and spam.
The method works very well when sorting text messages (including sampling it is possible to cut off up to 95-97% of spam. To bypass such filters, spammers sometimes place a content part in a picture attached to a letter, the text is either absent or random, which is not allows the filter to compile statistics for recognizing such letters.In this case, you need to use text recognition programs (most modern email programs do not support this), or use other methods.
The guarantee of the reliable operation of the Bayesian method is the constant additional training of the filter and indicating to it when it makes mistakes. For this purpose, mail programs introduce the ability to manually mark a message as "spam / non-spam", and in mail services on the Internet, a button "report spam".
Non-automatic filtration
Many programs and postal services on the Internet allow the user to set their own filters. Such filters can consist of words or, less often, regular expressions, depending on the presence or absence of which the message ends up or does not end up in the trash bin. However, such filtering is time consuming and inflexible, and also requires a certain degree of familiarity with computers from the user. On the other hand, it allows you to effectively filter out some of the spam, and the user knows exactly which messages will be filtered out and why.
Blacklists
Affiliation, use, efficiency
These include:
- lists of IP addresses of computers known to send spam from them.
- (widely used) lists of computers that can be used for mailing - "open relays" and "open proxies", as well as - lists of "dialups" - client addresses that cannot have mail servers
- (possible use) a local list or a list maintained by someone else.
- (widespread due to ease of implementation) blacklists, which are queried through the DNSBL service ( DNS B lack L ist). This method is currently not very effective. Spammers find new computers for their purposes faster than they can be blacklisted. In addition, several computers sending spam can compromise an entire mail domain or subnet, and thousands of law-abiding users will be deprived of the ability to send mail to servers using such a blacklist indefinitely.
- (there are) lists of preaching rather radical theories (for example, equating viral messages with malicious spam, etc.).
Misuse
Often the irresponsible and incorrect use of blacklists by resource administrators, leading to the blocking of a large number of innocent users.
Example: the use of lists without precise representations of which addresses and how are included in it, the use of mail blacklists for web resources, etc.
Irresponsible use
Example: failure to provide the user (or administrator) of the blocked address with information about the list (since there are a great many of them) or guiding in their actions by the principle of the presumption of guilt.
Racket by blacklist administrators
Recently, more and more complaints have appeared on the network against blacklist administrators who blackmail Internet providers and hosting providers by refusing to delete IP addresses from which spam was once possibly sent (addresses get blacklisted for anonymous complaints, which are often impossible to verify) ... In addition, many require a "donation" from the owners of IP addresses for removing entries from blacklists.
Mail server authorization
Various methods have been proposed to confirm that the computer sending the letter really has the right to do so (Sender ID, SPF, Caller ID, Yahoo DomainKeys, MessageLevel), but they have not yet become widespread. In addition, these technologies limit some common types of mail server functionality: it becomes impossible to automatically redirect correspondence from one mail server to another (
A common policy among providers is that clients are allowed to establish SMTP connections only with the provider's servers. In this case, it becomes impossible to use some of the authorization mechanisms.
Greylisting
Spam is the distribution of letters of an advertising nature of a political or commercial nature to those people who did not subscribe to it. Spam refers to emails received by the user's mail, phone, social applications such as whats app, skype and many others. Main subject emails can be different: from visiting a resort to offering to earn big money or getting a prize for some action that the user has never done.
The first episode of spamming took place in the nineteenth century. In 1864, telegraphic telegrams were received by British politicians advertising dental services. In the twentieth century, a similar term was used to denote a trademark of the Hormel Foods Corporation. it was an abbreviation SPAM and stands for SPiced hAM, which means "spicy ham". After the war, advertisements about the remaining unused canned food were broadcast at every step - from radio, newsstands, on trams and buses. On a television show in Britain there was a sketch called "SPAM". This is where the modern name comes from.
Sometimes spam turns from harmless letters into real black PR. For example, with its help, one company can denigrate another by sending out to Internet users, telephones, some last message defaming the reputation. With the help of such mailings, pornography, drugs and many other things that are prohibited by law are advertised.
Disguised as spam defrauding money... For example, a woman receives a message in the mail that her son had an accident and asks to send money for a complex operation and a number where savings should be sent. Those women who have never faced such actions believe and send money. And then it turns out that the son is healthy and nothing happened to him. More details about the types will be discussed below.
Types of spam
The most common type is advertising... Through advertising, companies sell services, offer goods. Such advertising is permitted by law. But many recipients are still wary.
Another type is " Nigerian letters". The name was formed due to the fact that a large number of such messages were received in Nigeria. The recipient of such a letter is promised a large amount of money, but it is necessary to formalize the opening of an account, shipping costs, which the fraudster will allegedly pay only when the recipient sends the money to him.
Almost the same in appearance is " phishing". Allegedly, the bank's administration will block the recipient's account if he does not send his details and does not confirm the data on the site, under which the link of the spammers' site is hidden. Thus, the fraudsters will receive all the necessary data in order to transfer the money that is in the recipient's account.
Happiness letters, common among schoolchildren and adults, in our country are also one of the varieties. They are based on the requirement to forward the message to as many friends as possible. And in return, a miracle will happen in the life of the recipient in a few days. Sometimes such messages may contain negative character. For example, to threaten heavenly punishment if a person does not forward a certain number of letters to friends.
All these lawful and illegal actions are committed by people who are called spammers. They can be distribution services, database collectors, software manufacturers, and even the general user. If a person wants to inform many people about something without their request or consent, he automatically becomes a spammer.
This type of mailing brings benefits to the customers of the letters. It is difficult to fight this species, but it is possible.
How to deal with spam
You can fight mailings yourself. If you often receive messages from a particular group or user, you can always add the person to black list and make sure that messages fall into a specially designated block. On the site mail.ru, or Yandex.Mail, it is called "Spam".
For a user who wants to protect themselves from spammers, Not recommended publish your mailing address on public sites. Or create a special box if you have to register in unreliable groups and communities. Not recommended reply to similar messages or follow the links in them. Perhaps a script is already hidden in the link that will block your computer or phone at best. At worst, it will gain access to your cards and bank accounts.
There are special software that protects against annoying mailings. Usually such antispam modules are built into the antivirus or installed separately. Kaspersky Lab, Antispamus, Counterspam are the best of these programs.
It is recommended that such senders be blacklisted on the phones. Letters will be arriving in separate block called "Antispam" on the phone. And the recipient, if he wants, can look, if not, then he can put on automatic deletion after a certain number of days.
Examples can be found in the pictures below. Such are the harmless mailings also called internet spam.
These are examples of mailings from regular users. There are also whole companies, for example, computer repairs, windows installation, which are engaged in such mailing, inserting links to their pages in usernames or in words. Below is an example:
What to do with spam emails
Why spam is dangerous
First of all, it is dangerous because in a pile of various mailings you will have to look for a really useful letter from a comrade or from work for a long time. By opening a spam message and following a link, you expose yourself and the corporate network to infection with various viruses. Third, the additional load on the network.
Spam is something every netizen is familiar with.
In the most common sense, spam is the mass distribution of promotional emails to users who have not given their consent to do so.
Spam now has many more meanings and variations: SMS spam, social media spam, and so on. But let's start with the origin of the word itself.
Term
The word "spam" itself, or rather the English version of "spam", has a rather funny origin. SPAM is originally a trademark of an American company; Under this brand in 1936, canned meat began to appear, of which during the Second World War were produced so much that an urgent advertising campaign had to be carried out - it was necessary to sell them before the expiration date. These canned goods were advertised everywhere, and advertisements were also broadcast on the radio.
This situation was played up in one of the episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus, and the word SPAM acquired its present meaning in 1986, when many identical messages of advertising for a financial pyramid appeared.
Now the amount of spam varies from year to year. For example, in 2017, the share of spam in total email traffic was just over half, 56.63%; the largest amount of spam (more than 13%) came from the United States.
Types of spam
- Mass mailing of lettersis the most famous type of spam. Spammers buy databases of email addresses and then send letters with commercial offers (which most often contain viruses, phishing, and so on).
- Messages in social networks and messengers... Previously, these were the same advertising messages as in letters, but now a scheme is becoming popular when a user's account is hacked, and then messages are sent on his behalf with a request to transfer a certain amount of money.
- Forum spam... Spammers are also active on forums: they leave messages in discussions and send private messages to users. Sometimes this is used to build the link mass of a site.
- Spam in comments on the site... The type of spam that site owners hate the most. The goal of spammers is still the same - either to advertise their products or services, or to increase thematic citation index(TCI).
- Spam in directories and message boards... Directories are used to promote websites (although less so now), and message boards are used for fraudulent ads.
- Spam by SMS... As with sending letters, spammers buy databases of users of cellular operators and send spam messages of an advertising or fraudulent nature.
Safe and dangerous spam
Spam messages can be divided into two large groups - safe and dangerous. The former are unpleasant, but threaten only with spoiled mood and a waste of time, but the latter can harm your computer and finances.
Safe spam
- Advertising of legal goods or services. These are ordinary advertising letters with the difference that users did not give their permission to receive them.
- Advertising of goods or services prohibited by law. If the law prohibits advertising a product or service, then spammers begin to actively use mailings, they have nothing to lose.
- Compromising letters. May be related to politics; are sent out in order to discredit competitors, and can also be sent ostensibly on behalf of competitors in order to change the opinion of them for the worse.
- "Letters of Happiness". Messages (including in instant messengers) with a request to forward the text to other users so that something good happens or something bad does not happen. Sometimes such letters are used by spammers to collect a database of addresses for subsequent mailings.
Dangerous spam
In general, spam is far from a harmless thing, so any messages that look like spam should be treated very carefully.
How to deal with email spam
In order to minimize the amount of spam in your mail, you need to start by understanding thathow users get to mailing lists.
- Inattention when registering on the site... Often, in the registration form, there is a checkmark immediately - consent to receive advertising materials. However, it is not difficult to refuse spam in this case: at the end of each letter there should be a link “Unsubscribe from the mailing list”.
- Breaking... Fraudsters hack users' websites and mails and gain access to databases (contacts).
- Sale... Unfortunately, the databases of addresses are sometimes sold by the site employees themselves.
- Phishing... The user enters his data on fake sites.
What to do?
The main advice, which has shown its effectiveness more than once:
register at least two email addresses. One for personal and work contacts, and the second for registration on commercial sites, sites with questionable content, and so on.
The next tip is to choose a reliable email service (for example, Gmail ). Spam filtering works well in such email services, so most fraudulent emails will go straight to the Spam folder.
If a letter nevertheless "burst" into the main folder with letters, be sure to mark it as spam - all further letters from this user will go there too.
Also, to get rid of spam, you can use filters and create rules (for example, in Yandex mail).
Conclusion
Spam is a serious problem - mainly because of the dangerous links and files that can be found inside the email, spam is a serious problem, especially for inexperienced users. Therefore, even if you are sure that you will never fall for the bait of scammers, be sure to tell your family and friends about the dangers.
Any Internet user knows the word "spam" today. Moreover, he not only knows, but often sees him in his e-mail. But not everyone knows that the word "spam" itself was once not associated with the Internet or with emails.
Spam is an acronym, an abbreviated word. It was formed from the truncated "spiced ham" - "spiced ham", "sausage with pepper", "pepper ham". Therefore, a direct translation of the English "spam" can be considered something like "spatchina" - "spices" plus "ham".
The history of this "ham" is as follows: in 1937 the American company "Hormel Foods" released minced sausage from the "illiquid" meat of the third freshness accumulated at the factory. The Americans did not buy the little appetizing product, so the owner of the corporation, Mr. Hormel, launched a large-scale marketing campaign, widely advertised his product and began to supply his canned food to the military departments and the navy.
In 1937, Hormel Foods fed the American and Allied forces with its produce. Even in post-war England, amid the economic crisis, spam was the staple food of the British. The "pink pieces of meat" that Orwell described in 1984 was the 1948 spam. So the word took on the meaning of something disgusting, but inevitable.
In December 1970, in the 25th issue of the sketch by the theater group Monty Python's Flying Circus, visitors find themselves in a restaurant where every dish contains spam ham. The waitress outlines the benefits of spam. The choir, disguised as Vikings, roars "Spam, spam, spam!" In the background, completely drowning out the conversations of the visitors. So the term "spam" began to be associated with unwanted, annoying, redundant information that "jammed" even useful messages.
The term "spam" in a new meaning (intrusive e-mailing, mail garbage) appeared in 1993.
The term "spam" in a new meaning (intrusive e-mailing, mail garbage) appeared in 1993. Usenet administrator Richard Depew wrote a program whose error on March 31, 1993 triggered the sending of two hundred identical messages to one of the conferences. His disgruntled interlocutors quickly found a suitable name for intrusive messages - "spam".
One of the earliest mass "spam mailings" can also be noted: in April 1994, the law firm Canter & Siegel hired a programmer who wrote a simple program, and advertised the office's questionable services throughout the conference on the same Usenet network.
Today the term "spam" (as well as its various derivatives - "spam", "spammer", etc.) has completely reoriented itself to e-mail and has become widespread, despite the fact that Hormel's sausages with this name are produced in the USA still.
UCE and UBE
Before giving our definition of the term "spam", a few words should be said about spam in general and how it is understood in other countries.
Spam (information not requested by the user), depending on the goals and objectives of the sender (spammer), may contain commercial information or have nothing to do with it. Thus, according to the content of the message, one can distinguish between "commercial" spam - "unsolicited commercial e-mail" (the common abbreviation is UCE) and "non-commercial" - "unsolicited bulk e-mail" (UBE).
In the United States, the law of each state often defines the concept of unsolicited (commercial) mailing differently, and in each state the legal status of the phenomenon of spam has its own nuances. Most state laws restrict the sending of only unsolicited emails related to the distribution of commercial information - UCE (Unsolicited Commercial Letter). However, in a number of states (for example, Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana) restrictions have been introduced for both UCE and UBE, i.e. to send mass mailings of any unsolicited email messages, regardless of their nature.
From the point of view of organizing the text of an e-mail, spam may contain in the "Subject" field information about what the message is (for example, that it contains advertising information), and in the body of the message - an indication in connection with which the sender addresses the recipient without prior consent, as well as information about what actions the recipient should take in order not to receive messages from the sender in the future, i.e., contain information about an email address, a resource on the Internet or a phone (usually a toll-free phone number), which are designed to unsubscribe (unsubscribe) from unsolicited information ("opt-out" function).
These signs (an indication in the Subject field and the presence of an unsubscribe mechanism) indicate that the sender understands that the information he is offering is being imposed on recipients, and that he is in good faith trying to reduce the possible negative impact on them. But very often the spammer is not only unwilling to reduce the discomfort from spam, but also refuses responsibility for his actions by falsifying the sender's address, using a third party address and falsifying message headers. All this is done in order to make it as difficult as possible to identify the sender and take appropriate measures against him.
Spam definition
As defined by Kaspersky Lab, spam is anonymous bulk unsolicited mailing.
In this definition, every word is important.
Anonymous: everyone suffers mainly from automatic mailings with a hidden or falsified return address.
Unsolicited: obviously, mailing lists and conferences should not fall within our definition (although the condition of anonymity is already largely guaranteed).
The definition of spam often includes the words "advertising" or "sales pitch". This is not entirely true - a significant portion of spam is not for advertising or commercial purposes. There are political spam mailings, there are “charitable” spam letters, there are fraudulent (“Nigerian”, phishing), “chain letters” - letters with a request to send to friends (horror stories, “letters of happiness”), viral and others that are not a commercial enterprise.
Thus, we divide all unsolicited offers that fell into the box into:
- spam that has all the characteristics of anonymous mass mailing,
- targeted commercial offers.
The first ones need to be filtered and sometimes deleted immediately - according to company policy. The latter can also be filtered, but must be handled more carefully.
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