Spamming

From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The act of spamming is when one person or company sends an unwanted email to another person. Spam emails are the computer version of unwanted "junk mail" that arrives in a mailbox, such as advertising pamphlets and brochures. Spam emails are usually sent to try to get the person to buy something or do something else that will cause gain for the sender.

The emails sent when someone is spamming is called spam. The person or company who sent the unwanted email is called a spammer.

Spam emails are often sent to many people at once trying to get them to buy a product or sign up for a service. The people who receive the email did not ask to receive the email, and do not want to receive it.

One of the reasons there is so much spam emails around is that it costs very little to send millions of spam messages at once. Spam messages can easily be sent, sometimes even by a special computer program.

[edit] How spammers find email addresses

The hardest part about spamming is to get the email addresses to send the spam to. Sometimes the spammers do this by searching for emails on the internet, or by buying emails from people who know a lot of them (for example, someone who runs a site that makes users tell them their email address to signup will have a lot of email addresses to sell to spammers).

One part of getting email addresses is to find addresses that are still in use. One trick used by spammers is to put a link at the end of a message like this:

If you do not wish to get more of these messages

from us click here to stop getting them.

If the person clicks on the link, it tells the spammers that there is someone at the address. Then the spammers put that person on a list of people who actually read spam messages. Next, the spammers and sell that list to other spammers. The same thing happens if the person sends another email back to the spammer (called "replying"), which also tells the spammer the message has been read.

Another trick that spammers use is to put a picture — even one that cannot be seen — into a spam message. The picture will have a name that goes with just that one email. When the email is opened, a request will be sent to the server that has that picture to get the image. If they get this request, then they know that you read their email, which could cause you to receive even more spam email.

[edit] How to avoid spam

Good ways to avoid spam are:

• Only give your email address to your trusted friends.
• Don't open email messages that are from people you do not know if you do not know why the email was sent to you.
• If you do open a spam message, do not reply to it, and do not click on any links in it.
• Don't ever buy anything from a spammer, the only reason spam exists is that it gets people to buy something.

[edit] Other meanings

The word "spamming" is also used to describe the act of typing a lot of words or text in Internet chatrooms, so that other people using the chatroom cannot carry on conversations. Spamming in Internet chatrooms is usually considered to be rude or annoying.

[edit] Problems with spam

Computer users at home and in workplaces waste a lot of time opening and deleting spam messages. In some cases, spam emails contain viruses or links to pornography or illegal gambling websites. Spam emails often advertise products or services which are being lied about by the companies sending the spam, such as frauds or "scams".