S P A M

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Aaargh, my email box is full of Spam every day. My questions are:

1) Why is spam mail always for the same stupid things like 'free cable', 'cheap prescriptions drugs', 'great investment opportunities', 'free diplomas'?

2) Who in their right mind would ever reply to these offers?

3) If nobody replies, then why do they keep sending them?

4) How can I reduce the amount of spam I get, without getting a new email address?

 

Well, being not very knowledgeable about many computer-related things, my suggestions may not be worth much when compared to the knowledge that abounds here but here goes anyway:

Probably because if it was for useful stuff, it wouldn't be spam I guess.

Only those that give in easily to pressure sales most likely, hence:

To harass those who give in to pressure sales?

The only suggestion I've ever had, besides checking the settings of your equivalent of Spamguard, is to not use an e-mail address that contains two names (or something to that effect).

Hope that helps.

 

In addition to what Catbert said in his number four, don't even bother clicking on that link in the email that says, "remove me from your mailing list"
Its actually a tracker that the spammer uses to verify your e-mail address is currently being used.
I'm not sure what email program you use, but even just opening the email is enough. Some emails will request a reciept when the email is read. Some email programs will automatically send that reciept without notifying you.
I use the newest version of Outlook (not express) to check my email and it does a pretty good job. If I keep getting an email from a certain domain and continuilly do not open it and delete it, Outlook learns and puts it immediately into my junk mail box. After awhile, my actually email server will just delete the email before even sending it to my mail box.
Another thing that may help prevent you from getting spam and junk mail in the first place is to get a router or something that will constantly change your IP address (I think that's it) so websites that track can't get your email address. I have broadband from my cable company and it does that.

 

I read an article in Illustrated Science about this before (search for it; its realy good(Im too lazy))

It seems as these spammers have a program which generates email adresses, these email adresses might not exist, but because it generates ALOT, some of the adresses WILL exist. The program detects if the email was recieved succesfully (meaning that the email adress exists) and then sends that email adress to other spam sites.
So because there are so many spam sites, and so many email generators working toghether, getting just one spam mail one day could result in thousands after a week.

 

Because some buggers think you will buy if they bother you for long enough. Some other buggers get paid for sheer amount of junk they send, meaning the effect is irrelevant. Free diplomas and other fake degrees appeal to people with low self esteem who need to stroke their ego with academic titles no matter how fake they are. In real life, they would buy academic dissertations. Great investment oppurtunities work on some naive greedy folk. Cheap prescriptions might work on naive people in unpleasant economical circumstances. And there goes penile enlargement. Those are the worst. They use the lowest of low tricks. They're simply sorry buggers that had better be shot.

Not everyone is in right mind. Well, maybe not to spam, but I write short and personal e-mails to intrusive search bar distributors. You know, some dumb searchbar simply installs in your system without asking you anything. E-mails typically end with "best wishes of prompt bankruptcy" and my full name.

Someone gets paid for the sheer amount of junk sent. And other idiots hope someone will reply at some point. And there are idiots who actually buy stuff that spammers advertise.

Have an address for registering for stuff like message boards, online services, discussion lists, sites you won't admit browsing and the like. Give your professional address only to your business partners and workmates. Give your personal address only to friends. Don't put your address in any signatures on posts or anything.

If you own a website, it's going to be tricky. In HTML, you can make the links JavaScript dependent and cut the address into pieces first and assemble it later in a script function (empty link destination, or even a non-link object with onclick() property calling a javascript function). This way, nothing like aaa@aaa.com will ever appear in the text. You can even make all e-mail addresses that appear on the page (spam crawlers typically go for mailto: links, but hell... it's not a problem to filter e-mail addresses from other content) javascript output through document.write("snowwhite" + "@" + "7dwarves.org"). The trick is, JavaScript is client side, so it might block at least some crawlers from collecting the address.

In XHTML, document.write won't work, but you should be still able to change labels, captions, text field values and the like.

There are server-side tricks as well, but those are hard on your bandwidth. You can place a link on your page to lead to a random collection of unworking e-mails with a self-link followed by some random ?56563 or whatever call. As it's server-side, the crawler will accept it like just another site. When it gets sucked in a loop sucks in too much fake addresses, it will make its whole database useless.

Fortunately, there are people who run such pages and you can use their bandwidth for the purpose. Here's a link: http://www.auditmypc.com/freescan/antispam.html.

May spambots die. Spammers should be castrated.

 

At times this is quite impossible, as the title can be something like "Hey! I forgot to mention...", or anything that makes you open it. However, this is also a browser problem, so guess what?

Keep option "Do not open images in Newsgroups" enabled. In Mozilla.

It's actually pretty amusing where they sell emails. Ever given address to a porn site then ended up receiving ads from a medical store?

Taluntain, why not change it then? If you ask me, it's pretty stupid to battle with spam from day to day when you can just create a new email and avoid making the same mistake again. Easily saves hours in a year.

As to why they spend spam. Well, there are two ways to get customers, in general. One: so called "magnet-marketing", which is used by all big companies by making their products look attractive . Two: "funnel-marketing", or; advertising the product to as many people as possible. Since emailing costs nothing to them, and even if the sales-ratio is only 1 to 10.000, they make profit (1 million spams means 100 customers, and make that million spams per month. 12x100=1200 customers, which is more than enough to keep going.)

Sadly, I can easily imagine emailing becoming commercial in the future; call it "Bandwidth Tax" or "eStamp", or anything (the latter suggested by MS).

 

Well, it would be bad if people were forced to pay for bandwidth they use receiving e-mails they didn't want. However, there could be a nice advantage to that: bandwidth stealth would get closer to casual theft from a legal standpoint. It would be easier to do something nasty do identified spammers than now - because they wouldn't be merely bothering you. They would be stealing your bandwidth. Due to the manner in which they distribute their unwanted advertising, a mere bandwidth cost vindication wouldn't suffice and claims for damages could enter the stage.

Personally, I believe all detected spammers should be ordered to pay considerable sums to anti-spam institutions approved by some government cell. The damages should multiply each subsequent time the spammer would be caught. It should also be possible for the court to order the business closed down on that account.

Those who send sex-related ads should receive additional punishment as they can in no way make sure that minors won't receive those e-mails. The manner in which penile enlargement ads are worded merits a very special treatment - it shouldn't be legal for businesses to send you messages along the lines of "hello, you small dicky, wanna get bigger and finally be able to satisfy your woman?". It's so miserable it's beyond offence, but this shouldn't warrant impunity. Idiots sometimes need more drastic methods of learning.

To make the process further easier, it should be criminal to include dots in the middle of a word in message subjects, numerical 0s instead of o, and other such leet to deceive spam detectors. If someone doesn't want messages that have a given subject, he doesn't want them for a reason. Deceiving his spam protection by such lowly tricks is nothing else than trespass and should be treated accordingly.

Yeah, and make any such trespass equal to traditional trespass on property. My computer is no less my property than my house is.

 

The funny thing is that I believe it to be the same persons producing both spam and anti-spam software. Logical, isn't it? If you know how to block spam, you know how to pass those filters, thus create effective spam-programs. Selling both means that the market will grow, and you will make twice as much money.

Spam market, here I come.

 

Thank god I havent recieved any spam, ever. Is it because I have hotmail instead of email?

 

@Bahir the Red, hotmail is an email domain (that the right term?) same as yahoo and various others. Hotmail is a free email service (with a limited storage capacity) and some spam filtering integrated into it (the junk mail folder).

That you have got no spam ever though is impressive unless:
1. The address is very new
2. You have never signed up to anything with the address.
3. You have only given the address to (real) people you know.

 

1. its old
2. I have (for example, this place)
3. given it to people i dont know

I guess im lucky

 

Actually, more or less every forum has that policy -excluding the obvious pr0n forums, maintained by the spammers themselves.

 

Wirhe, what is the meaning of the word "Pr0n"?
I have never heard it before...
Heh, I frequently get spam from African people that are actually my brother and my mother at the same time and would like me to cheat them out of usually USD 30.000.000 but other then that hardly anything.
I don't usually sign up to stuff though, I am member only to SP and I never give my E-mail adress out - 'cept in the FAI at times, which I suppose is very stupid, but nothing bad has happened so far - gotta love the SP attitude

 

Then castration is really the only way to limit the ranks of spammers