Spammer's
Notebook
Email marketing is the most effective form of online promotional activity.
But increasing spam epidemic may not let it reach
its potential and could result in its premature death.
Let us see what the spammers do and how they are breaking
your potential promotional marketing back bone.
What is spamming?
Spamming is an act of sending unsolicited
email messages in bulk. Spammers do not ask customers
to opt-in and bombard recipients' inboxes with
unwanted junk emails. Most of these emails are
related to pornography, unwanted promotional matter
or email scams.
How
do spammers harvest email addresses?
- Spammers scan UseNet for
email address using ready made programs designed
to do so.
- From Mailing list they attempt
to get the lists of subscribers.
-
Spammers
have programs which spider through web pages,
looking for email addresses.
-
From web
and paper forms. Spammers can get email addresses
from those either because the form becomes
available on the World Wide Web, or because
the site sells / gives the emails list to
others.
-
Use various
tricks to extract a surfer's email address
from the web browser.
Email addresses
posted on various job sites, information sites.
-
Spammers
harvest AOL names from user profiles lists.
-
From the
email addresses posted on a public accessible
site.
-
By guess
work and making up of ids.
-
From chat
sites.
-
Hacking
sites.
-
Hijacking mail servers
-
Buying lists from others.
-
From white and yellow pages
Harmful effects
of spamming
-
Spammers
ruin legitimate mailers' names by using those
mailers' domains as the sender address in
their spam runs.
-
Legitimate
emails are ignored in the deluge of unsolicited.
-
U.S. businesses
lost about US$4 billion in productivity last
year, 2003, because of spam, and those losses
could mount without an intervening technology
or policy to curb unwanted messages.
-
The growth
in spam also imposes significant costs on
Internet Service Providers (ISPs), businesses,
and other organizations, since they can only
handle a finite volume of e-mail without making
further investments in their infrastructure.
-
Spam programs
flood host mail servers with text, pictures,
and other content on various topics and, as
a result, congests these servers reducing
their efficiency.
-
Spam clearly
cost consumers both time as they read and
delete the e-mail advertisements and potentially
money in the form of higher Internet service
fees charged to defray the costs of the spam
traffic.
The growing clout
of spam emails has resulted in mushrooming of
black lists to protect customer's interest. However
due to certain reasons, it may also result in
your IP being listed and blocked from reaching
your opt-in customer's inbox.
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