Spam - What is it?
[ What is spam? ] [ Why is it bad? ]
[ What to do and NOT to do ]
[ How to avoid it ] [ Links ]
What is spam?
Spamming is when someone sends messages to a multitude of people who haven't chosen to receive mail from that person or about that product. Usually the message tries to sell something or to promote a web site. There are three major forms of spam; e-mail spam, Usenet spam, and instant messenger spam.Spam, or unsolicited e-mail, is an incredibly irritating part of being online. If you have a web page, you'll notice a steady increase in spam in your inbox the longer your site is up. For a while, I was receiving up to twenty mails a day, of which no more than one or two were mail directed to me personally. Fortunately, as long as you don't have a web page, you run a very low risk of being overwhelmed by spam. Fortunately for webmasters and webmistresses, there are ways to avoid being forced to open up spammed mail in your inboxes.
- E-mail Spam is usually targeted at individual e-mail addresses that are collected from newsgroups, web pages (robots scan pages and collect all addresses they find), or public listings.
- Usenet Spam targets newsgroups, thereby reaching a large amount of people at once.
- Instant Messenger Spam can easily target a large amount of users since numbers and IDs often are public knowledge and not too difficult at all to find. However, the most common type of instant messenger spam is probably the forwarded warnings, which work like chain mails.
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