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Purpose: At present spam is a household word, since 70-80% of all email traffic is spam. Although spam written in English is the most common, it comes in all languages as well as Chinese, Korean and other Asian languages. In most cases spam is advertising, and incident shows that spammers have targeted specific goods and services to promote. Some goods are chosen because a computer user is likely to be interested, but majority are grey or black market goods. In other words, spam is usually illegal not only because of the means used to advertise the goods, but also because the goods and services being presented are illegal in themselves. The recipient is asked to provide bank account details; if the recipient provides these details, the bank account will be emptied without their consent. This type of spam is usually called a 'scam'. Spam worldwide has a propensity to advertise a certain range of goods and services irrespective of language and geography.
Types: Harvested address spam is probably the most common type of spam. The spammers use a computer system to check almost every website on the internet. It looks at the code of every web page, it looks for the '@' symbol. When it finds that symbol it knows it’s found an email address. It then collects either side of the '@' symbol to capture your email address and add it to the spammers database of millions of harvested addresses. From then one will receive lots of spam. Virus Spam is the 2nd most common type of spam. Someone else's computer gets infected with a virus. The address book on that computer has your email address. The virus sends a spam to every address in their address book. The spam does not appear to come from the senders email address; instead it says it came from another address taken from the address book. There is no point replying to the spam as the 'sender’s address' is wrong, which means it will go to someone who didn't send the spam. If you have a domain name for a website you are probably getting domain name spam. Spammers use the whole database to get a list of most of the domain names in the world. The spammers suppose most website owners to set up generic email addresses such as sales@ and info@. They only send spam to all of the standard generic words at email every domain name in the world. You can now and then receive dictionary spam when you use a well known email service. The spammers know that there is going to be a particular email address. They setup computers to spam billions of names at that mail service merely by targeting every person’s name. Hoax spam is messages that innocent people may forward to you with some kind of hoax warning or way to make a fortune. Never answer to or forward this kind of message. They are hoaxes. If you 'CC' (copy in) your friends and contacts you may provide a way for spammers to harvest the email addresses of your friends/contacts.
Conclusion: Today, people class all unsolicited email as spam, including automatic replies, emails containing viruses and unsolicited, but legitimate business propositions. Categorizing all such emails as spam is correct, but it must be highlighted that some categories of spam are more dangerous. The first half of 2004 brought several virus epidemics where viruses were circulated using spammer techniques.
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