Free Mailing List Subscriptions:

If you are reading this post, then Im sure that you have an email address. And if you have an email address, it is not difficult for me to collect it. Right? I just ask you to register on my blog, and offer you some services, or ask you to join my mailing list to get free stock alerts or whether alerts. i can find some stupid way to lure people to signup for some mailing list or any thing at all, and get them enter their email ids on the site, and get it validated as well. Then I’ll promote the site fanatically, and collect about a million validated email ids in a few months. I keep on sending crap with whether or stock updates and always ask members to keep their email ids updated, and ask you to enter a few of your friend’s ids and promise you gifts for the referals and make my database with 1 million email ids to 10 million overnight.

Then I hire 2 people, make them work day and night for a week, categorize the email ids, and float it in the market anonymously for 10 cents per id. I become a Millionare and live happily ever after.

So this is how a spam database is generated.

My unsuspecting list members continue to receive the mails and alerts that I send, and they slowly start receiving mails that would talk about penis enlargement or breast enhancement. All of these would be fake, and not one mail would be genuine. People who fall for end up loosing their money and wont be able to complain, as they wouldn’t want the others to know that they were looking for penis enlargement of breast enhancement, and the others who know what it is, get annoyed and mark the mails as spam.

Defence? The best way to defend this sort of spam is, to take extreme care on where you are using your email id. Never signup for stupid email lists here and there. If you think you must do it, you’d better take an alternate email id, and use it for this purpose, so that your main email id is not flooded with spam.

Crawlers and spyders:

There are a few other ways that the spam database is created. There are crawlers and spyder like software installed on web servers that surf each and every website that it can lay its crawlers on, and extract all text email ids that are on the pages. For example, if you have a website, or a blog, or atleast a pages.google.com site hosted anywhere, by default you are likely to leave your email id there. This id is picked up by the crawler and is stored in a database, and is then sold and the owner of the crawler becomes a millionare.

To avoid this from happening, the smartones started listing their emails on their sites as ravi [at] ravisblog dot com, and ravi at ravi’s blog dot co m. Creating spiders to fetch email ids in this format is not that difficult, and this very few people know.

Defence? You could use email ids written out on image files and you can display the image files on the sites. You could add some distortion to the image to be extra sure. Spyders find it difficult to read images with minor distortions. Best of all, use a contact form on your site, and keep your email id hidden inside an encrypted php or asp file. Alternatively you could disguize the email address example@domain.com with the HTML equivalent example@d

Random Mail id generation:

Certain spammers make out names randomly. For example, they create programs to generate email ids. Lets say, they set the domain name to yahoo.com, and enter the name john, and the software would generate a huge list of ids with some possible combinations like john@yahoo.com, john1@yahoo.com, john123@yahoo.com etc. They then shoot out emails to all the ids that they have generated, and atleast 1 out of 10 mails are delivered. So if they shoot out 10 million mails, atleast 1 million is delivered, and the remaining 9 million are bounced back.

So if your email id is common, and can be randomly generated by a simple program, then you are bound to be spammed even if you do not use the id to send out or receive a single mail.

Defense? Don’t go much for free email ids offered by yahoo, gmail and hotmail. Get your own domain name and hosting, and host the mails if you wish with google.com/a or hotmail, so that you get the advantage of using the huge mail boxes free of charge as offered, and you spend about $10 a year for the domain name and managed dns. Visit domains.indyahozting.com for info on how to get a domain name and managed dns.

The Spamming Business:

People who get thir hands on the email addresses put up offers to the Penis Enlargement and the Breast Enhancement guys who in turn buy their services. You will find that their mails are less than 1 kb in size, just to ensure that maximum number of mails are sent out in a limited amount of time. Bigger organizations do the spamming themselves.

Spammers sit on PCs with relatively high bandwidth connections from ISPs with poor management and monitoring. They use all possible ways of proxy to mask the source of the emails and avoid bounces back to their ISP. If a mail bounces back to the ISP, he is most certain to get caught. Thus loads and loads of mails are sent out in multiple instances. A successful spammer would send out atleast 10 million emails out per hour from 1 PC or server, and make the traffic look like data upload or torrent traffic. There are very few ways of stopping them.

At times these spammers hack mailboxes, and send out mails thru them, making the mails look as if they were sent from the owner of the mail box in the header.

Types of Bulk Mail:

Most of the time, the type of bulk mail that you will see in yoru mail box would be sexual content. People would be trying to lure into something, and make you pay, and run away with it, and make sure that you are not in a position to make a complaint. If a porn site takes money from you, and you are not given quality content, you naturally aren’t in a position to make a complaint. So thats 1.

Secondly, there are these unsolicited commercial e-mails (UCE). These claim to be legal, and come out with an unsubscribe link, and it would claim that you are receiving this mail as you had subscribed to the mailing list, while obviously you wouldnt have. And there are two types of people who send you these mails. The ones who would process your unsubscribe request, and the others who wouldnt. These people usually send mails from the same address all the time, so its better to create a filter on your mail box and direct them straight to the trash box.

There are several Datacentres in the world that allow this sort of bulk mailing. For example, Aplus.net supports this sort of thing, and you will find almost all of their ip addresses that come with their servers to be black listed.

It may not be legal. Is it atleast Morally right?

No. It isn’t. Think of the ways that people are mislead. Ok. Forget that. We can educate users to stay away from this sort of emails. Think of all the bandwidth that is being wasted with this useless junk mails. Think of the waste of resources that the servers are using up to fight spam.

The legitimate people who go for bulk mailing:

Its the year end, and christmas is a little over a month away, and the new year will follow in another week. I have started clearing my mailbox, as Im sure that i will get thousands of emails a day from the various organization with whom I have registered, wishing me Merry Christmas and a Happy new year. I dont want those mails to make my mailbox get flooded. These people who go for this sort of mailing, would be having about a million email ids with them, and they would collect another 10 million mail ids from the commercial market, and wish them all happy new year, and provide a link to their site, and when you receive a mail from a popular company, you naturally click on the link, and buy a product off their site in the new year sale.

Moral of the story?

Never float your email ids around.

Always make sure that they are encrypted if they are put up on any web page.

Be aware on how you will get spammed. If you think you might get spammed use a different mail id which will not affect you.

Do not use simple or small email ids which are easy to guess.

Dont join public mailing lists in yahoogroups or googlegroups.

Go for your own domain name and hosting and use a spam filter.