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In this article:
- What is Spam or spamming
- Types of Spam
What is Spam or Spamming?
The misuse of electronic methods of sending messages over the Internet to send unwanted and unsolicited messages is called Spamming. Spamming is usually done with the aim of advertising a product or service. It is an economical method of reaching ‘potential’ customers as the only work required by the advertiser is maintaining the various mailing lists they have. Since the blocking techniques for spam are still in its nascent stages (though there has been some considerable development), spam still finds an easy entry into the various media. The ultimate loss is to the public who spend time deleting such messages and the Internet service providers as the sending of bulk messages puts a high amount of load on their servers. Additionally, spam messages have also lead to many cases of fraud over the Internet.
Types of Spam
There exist various types of spam messages that spread through the different types of media available for online communication. These are explained below:
- E-mail spam
This is the most common and widely used form of spamming. Under this, a certain unsolicited or un-asked for message is sent to a large number of recipients at a time. This means that as against the usual commercial e-mails, spam mails are sent out without taking any permission from the receiver of the e-mails. The techniques employed to stop these e-mails is called e-mail filtering and the senders use various methods or rather, tricks to evade the e-mail filters. The basic requirement for this type of spamming is to have the e-mail addresses of people whom the spam mail is to be sent to. For finding these, spammers can use various methods that includes DNS listings, guessing common names and also, searching for e-mail address of people residing in a particular area. Spammers may also make use of software called web spiders, which is capable of finding e-mail addresses that are put on the web pages of various websites.
An important issue for e-mail spammers is to somehow bypass the email filters that can identify the origin of such e-mails. For this purpose, they make use of a variety of techniques. A common practice is that of spoofing where the spammers try to get the filters to believe that the email (spam) came from a different e-mail address. Also, the subject lines of the e-mails maybe changed to look different than the usual subjects used by spam e-mail. This means that the spelling of a word is intentionally ‘spoiled’ so as to prevent the filters from detecting the message as spam (eg., Viagra may be spelled as Vaigra). However, most recipients of email can easily identify such messages owing to the spelling mistakes introduced by the spammers. Modern e-mail filters are capable of detecting spam even with spelling mistakes.
- Messaging spam
This type of spamming takes place in Instant messaging systems such as ICQ and Yahoo Messenger etc. This type of spamming maybe called “spim” (spam + instant messaging). The advertiser goes on introducing new and new messages in the chat rooms or directly to the person who is chatting on the service. These often have a link to a website which is owned by the advertisers. More recently, ‘IM bots’, which are special software programs that ‘log’ into chat rooms and go on sending spam messages at regular intervals.
- Newsgroup spam and Forum spam
This is the oldest form of spam and has existed since the Usenet newsgroups. Under this type of spamming, the same message is posted on a newsgroup repeatedly. Forum spamming involves posting messages that are off-topic and have no relevance to the main topic of the forum. The problem of spamming in internet forums has resulted in many servers going down due to the overload of traffic.
- Blog, wiki, and guestbook spam
This is of very recent origin and it makes use of the comment facility provided by blog, guestbooks and Wikis. Spammers commonly put a link in the comment section to their website without actually putting any valuable comments in the first place.
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