What is spam?

«Spam» is the generally used definition for illegitimate and force sending of electronic messages to a big amount of recipients. As a rule, these messages contain different kinds of ambiguous advertisement (numerous products, services, get-rich-quick schemes etc). Spam can contain not only commercial information.

Spam is divisible by:

mobile phone messaging spam;
e-mail spam;
spam in blogs;
web search engine spam;
instant messaging spam;
other types of spam which are not worth to be mentioned.

Among the rest kinds of spam, the most widespread is e-mail spam. It uses individual e-mail addresses and direct messages. In other words, spammers send numerous unsolicited and illegitimate e-mails (which include certain information favorable to them) to a big amount of e-mail addresses. Besides various advertisements, a spam letter can contain, for example, a long compassionate story with an entreaty to transmit a certain amount of money to the sender. It is reasonable that recipients are not asked if they wish to get such mails.

Spam senders acquire e-mail addresses from Web pages, DNS listings, different mailing lists, posts to UseNet which contain e-mails, WEB and paper forms, chat rooms and IRC, AOL profiles, buying lists etc. Also they use such ways as fitting prevalent names at different domains, pilfering e-mail lists, using Ident daemons and “web spiders” . “Spiders” are special programs, which search e-mails on different web-pages. Very often, spammers mask their letters against anti-spam systems in different ways. It can be a big length of message, spoofing an e-mail address, deliberate mistakes in key words in the headings (or other changes) and other contrivances.

Commonly, the spam spreaders use spambots. They are appropriate programs producing spam. By the way, they can produce not only almost inoffensive and just annoying advertisement. As well, spambots can spread computer viruses. The outlet is using firewalls and antivirus solutions which protect the user's computer and don't let the diverse viruses in.

Of course, both spamming and anti-spam systems develop constantly and approximately simultaneously. But the problem is that anti-spam systems are too incomplete to detect and prevent all the spammers’ contrivances, at least because of their quantity.

If the spamming exists and develops, it is logical to conclude, that spamming is rather advantageous. The main reason is that spammers as usual don't have any economical spending. Moreover, it's difficult to account them and their mailings. Senders of spam messages multiply quite quickly. Correspondingly, the quantity of illegitimate mail increases. In spite of a large quantity of various anti-spam deleting and blocking systems, it does pay its way and the quantity of spammers increase all the time.