Spam mails
Spam mails also known as junk e-mail involves sending of nearly identical messages to numerous recipients through e-mail by perpertrators known as Spammers. A common synonym for spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail (UBE). It is also interesting to know that spam averages 94% of all e-mail sent.
E-mail spam has steadily grown since the early 1990s to several billion messages a day. Spam has really frustrated, confused, and annoyed e-mail users.
The quantity of spam you get may depend on the first letter in your e-mail address, a study reveals. The analyses, of more that 500 million junks massages revealed those letters that get more junk than average.
It found that e-mail addresses starting with an “A”, “M” or “S” got more than 40 percent spam. By contrast those begin with a “Q” or “Z” got about 20 per cent.
The difference could be down to the way spammers generate e-mail addresses they want to target, said the study.
The most popular letters for spammers were “A”, “M”, “S”, “R” and “P”. About 40 percent of all the messages arriving in the e-mail inboxes of accounts with addresses that had one of those characters as their first letter were junk.
Sometimes spammers may carry out what is referred to as “dictionary” attacks. In these, spammers take the part of live e-mail address in front of the “@” symbol that they know is live, and add that to other domain names to generate a new one.
For instance, spammers who know that there is a real person attached to john@yahoo.com may try john@hotmail.com to see if that reaches a live account too.
E-mail addresses are also collected by spammers from chatrooms, websites and newsgroups. Such e-mail are also sold to other spammers. Much of the spam mails are sent to invalid e-mail addresses.
You've probably noticed that much of the spam you receive in your e-mail account involves deceptive practices. For example, spam for X-rated sites may be disguised with a personal subject header ("I’m missing you" or "See my new pictures") or even as anti-spam ("Let help remove you from spam lists!"). And you've no doubt noticed that a lot of the spam that comes your way is attempting to perpetuate some sort of scam. Examples of such scam include stuffs like unbelievable stock offerings, pirated software, and quack health or medical orders.
Some spam allows you to request that your email address be removed from the spammer's list. When you respond to a spam email, what you have succeeded in doing is verifying that your email account is active.
Sometimes you received an e-mail asking you to forward it to all your contacts. You have to be careful with such mails as it maybe spam mails that could also come with deadly viruses that would infect your system, harvest your address book and that of the people who received that same mail from you.
So when next you receive such an e-mail asking you to click a link that would remove you from spammers’ list or asking you to forward to all your contacts in your address book to receive “goodluck” in return, just remember one word “DELETE”. Stop that SPAM Now.
