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    • Information about Spam and Spamming

    Spam by email is one type of spamming that involves sending identical or nearly identical messages to thousands (or millions) of recipients. Addresses of recipients are often harvested from Usenet postings or web pages, obtained from databases, or simply guessed by using common names and domains. By definition, spam is sent without the permission of the recipients.

    The terms unsolicited commercial email (UCE) and unsolicited bulk email (UBE) are sometimes used as more precise or less slang-like expressions for spam. Most US legislative efforts against spam are tailored to address UCE. A small but noticeable proportion of unsolicited bulk email is non-commercial; examples include political advocacy spam and chain letters.

    Sending spam is a violation of the Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) of almost all Internet Service Providers, and can lead to the termination of the sender's account. In many jurisdictions, spamming is a crime or an actionable tort, such as in the United States, where the act is regulated by the Can Spam Act of 2003.

    Spammers frequently engage in deliberate fraud to send out their messages. Spammers often use false names, addresses, phone numbers, and other contact information to set up "disposable" accounts at various Internet service providers. They also often use falsified or stolen credit card numbers to pay for these accounts. This allows them to quickly move from one account to the next as each one is discovered and shut down by the host ISPs.

    Spammers frequently go to great lengths to conceal the origin of their messages. They do this by spoofing email addresses (much easier than Internet protocol spoofing). The spammer hacks the email protocol (SMTP) so it looks like it is coming from another email address. Some ISPs and domains require the use of SMTP-AUTH allowing the specific account from which an email originates to be positively identified.

    Spammers frequently seek out and make use of vulnerable third-party systems such as open mail relays and open proxy servers. The SMTP system, used to send email across the Internet, forwards mail from one server to another; mail servers that ISPs run commonly require some form of authentication that the user is a customer of that ISP. Open relays, however, do not properly check who is using the mail server and pass all mail to the destination address, making it quite a bit harder to track down spammers.

    Increasingly, spammers are using networks of virus infected Windows PCs (zombies) to send their spam. Zombie networks are also known as Botnets.



    This page contains content that is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Spam e-mail".
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