I can't imagine that anyone with an e-mail
address has not received unsolicited e-mail or spam in one form or another.
What do you do when you receive these types of e-mails. Do you delete
them right away, respond to them informing the sender you do not wish to
receive them, or forward them to a friend whom you think might be interested
in the information?
When the Internet as we know it was very young
and most unsolicited e-mails where either by accident or the result of
opt-in subscriptions, you could respond with the word "unsubscribe" in the
reply subject and your name was taken off the list. That quickly
changed once people found out how powerful a marketing tool e-mail was.
Now, most of the time you respond to unsolicited e-mails you are letting the
sender know that your e-mail address is active or alive. Instead of
being taken off the list you are targeted more aggressively. The
sender of the e-mail may also sell your e-mail address to other e-marketers,
substantially increasing the number of unsolicited e-mails your receive.
One of the ways spammers get hold of your
e-mail is literally through guessing. For instance, say your e-mail
address is part of the domain "-notrealdomain-.com", and your e-mail address
is "me@-notrealdomain-.com", the
spammers have programs that will generate thousands of combinations of names
/ domains i.e. "me@-notrealdomain-.com"
, ""you@-notrealdomain-.com" , "them@-notrealdomain-.com"
hoping that somewhere along the line the target e-mail address exists.
It's really not difficult to do, since a computer can do this over
and over again. If you receive one of these e-mails and reply to it you
have just informed the sender that they did indeed find a live address.
It's all downhill from there.
Another interesting tactic is to send someone
an e-mail and make it appear as if it came from your address. Have you ever
received an e-mail from someone you don't know and don't have in you contact
list asking you to stop sending them unsolicited e-mails? Many people
experience this problem. Basically, the spammer made the recipient of the
spam think you sent it to them. This is called e-mail spoofing and is
relatively easy to do. The spammers use mail servers that allow something
called "mail relay." This allows them to send e-mails from any source
address to any target address.
A few things to keep in mind when dealing with
unsolicited e-mails and spam:
If you receive e-mail or spam from someone you
don't know, do not respond to it. Just delete it;
If someone informs you that they are
receiving spam from your e-mail address, inform them that it was not sent
by you and most likely came from a spammer who spoofed your address.
Tell them to just delete it;
Never give out your e-mail address
unless you are sure the site or organization will be responsible
for it's privacy;
If you are going to sign up for
something like a news article or other information, read their privacy statement, agreement, and disclaimer before doing so;
And
Review the entire privacy statement to make sure
there are no check boxes or radio buttons on by default. You never
know what you are agreeing to.
