It is a business model where individuals send emails to millions of people. You might be wondering why I called it a business model. The individual sending such huge number of mails will usually send some advertising or scam mails, even if .1% or less people reply to the mail or buy products advertised in these mails the sender recovers his expenditure and he become profitable.

Few examples are “You got 500 million dollar, reply to some address”, “you are legal heir of a some millionaire, Reply to some address”, “buy cool watches cheap”, “buy software for cheap”, “buy some product”, etc.

How does it work?

It is a multistage process spanning emailid harvesting/buying, getting access to SPAM botnet, sending emails

E-mailid harvesting / buying: E-mailid harvesting is a process of crawling the internet (reading as many web sites as possible) and getting the email addresses from all over the web. This process will mostly be automated. An Spammer may either harvest the email ids or buy from other spammers.

SPAM botnet: These are the systems from which emails will be sent. Usually these systems will not be owned by the spammer. but, will be some system on the Internet which was compromised for spamming/phishing purposes.

Sending out mails: Spammer will have the email to send and some setup which can send emails automatically to the email addresses provided.

How to defend yourself from SPAM?

First and foremost is to follow the proverb “Prevention is better than cure”.

• Never ever publish your email id over the Internet.
• If you have to compulsorily publish your email id, I suggest that you write your email id in an jpg/gif file and publish this on the Internet instead of publishing it as plain text.
• Never reply to SPAM mails
• Never click any links on a SPAM mails
• Never download any attachments from mail got from unknown sender.
• Do not provide your email id to any website you do not trust.

Free mail service providers use many technologies like tarpitting, statistical SPAM filtering, SPF, DomainKeys, etc, on your behalf to keep your Inbox SPAM free. In spite of their effort few SPAM mails reach your inbox. It is our responsibility to help the the community by pressing the SPAM button on the email window so that someone else does not get that mail. With community effort we can make spammers run out of business and stop SPAM once and for all.