Fight Spam on the Internet

Spam emails are emails of nearly identical messages that are sent to numerous recipients who did not solicit or ever need them. These emails are also commonly known as junk emails simply because they do not serve to any interests of the recipient. They are simply sent to serve as an advertisement or a promotional vehicle for some businesses.

From the time it started sometime in the 1980's, email spam has become a worldwide problem that has reached about 100 billion of such messages being sent to different recipients online each dayas of April of 2008. Spam emails have become a frustration and an annoyance for people when they find it in their email inboxes. Laws against such spam emails has since been established to protect online users of being inundated by such junk emails.

Types of Spam Emails

There are different types of spam emails that online users may receive on their inboxes. There is the Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE) that are emails usually sent in large quantities. Then there is the Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE) that is a favored term used by regulators and that refers to bulk emails usually sent for commercial purposes.

Any fraudulent or suspect emails may also be considered as spam emails. Any messages where a forged identity is used or bulk emails sent by software programs through unprotected servers are also considered as spam emails.

How Spam Emails are Processed

Some people may wonder just how these unwanted emails get into their inboxes. The main reason is that spammers have been able to get hold of the recipient's email address in order to send them. Spammers usually need these email addresses in bulk so to send the same email to as many people as possible. This is being done through email address harvesting.

Email Address Harvesting

For spammers to reach out to millions of spam email recipients, they need to obtain lists upon lists of different email addresses. Spammers usually do this by buying such lists from so-called list merchants or using software programs to obtain email addresses online. This allows spammers to get hold of many email addresses they can send bulk emails by the thousands.