Spam 101?

Fruitbat

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I feel like I should know this but I don't. Where does spam come from and why? I'm talking about all those emails I get daily that say crazy, nonsensical things. They're often not even trying to sell anything but just babbling. Are there people throughout the world who sit around all day making up nonsense sentences and sending them to as many email addresses as possible for some reason or what?

Dumbbat
 

robjvargas

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Basically, yes.

Remember, spam costs nothing. You pay your ISP the same amount whether you send 100 emails or 100,000 emails. And if just one tenth of one percent of people who get it click the links, the sender makes a profit.

I wish I still had the link to the study. As I recall, it took place in the late 1990's, during the "Internet Boom." A university bought a listing of 10,000 email addresses. They then sent the recipients an email that read, approximately:

If you click the link in this email, we will infect your computer with a virus.

They got something like a 30% click rate.

The human propensity for denial should never be underestimated.
 

Maggie Maxwell

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I doubt there's someone making the sentences personally, most likely a random word generator or one of a collection of premade word jumbles.

I don't know anything about those, but I actually had a job sending spam email, the selling-stuff-you-never-asked-for type (don't judge, it was my first job out of college and the words 'spam email' were not involved in the interview process.) I can answer some questions if you have any on that portion.
 

KellyAssauer

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I'd like to know why I keep getting 'pill offers' for body parts I don't own...

:D
 

Fruitbat

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So, these people are getting paid in some way for clicks on the links they send (or it's computer generated, with the same end purpose of getting hits on a site that sells something? And then perhaps the spam emails that don't even include a link were mistakes and meant to include a link? Does that sum it up?
 
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robjvargas

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So, these people are getting paid in some way for clicks on the links they send (or it's computer generated, with the same end purpose of getting hits on a site that sells something? And then perhaps the spam emails that don't even include a link were mistakes and meant to include a link? Does that sum it up?

Spam can be sent for any of several reasons. But they all center around one goal: Click the link.

Some of them have agreements with sites. A penny or three per click. There's a lot of this. You click the link, they get a piece of candy.

Some of them want you to fill out a form giving away your personal information and perhaps "breaking" any Do Not Call (DNC) registration you may have. Remember, once they have you information, you have a MUCH harder time proving that you don't have a "business relationship" that makes DNC invalid.

Some of them want you to download bad software. You think it's legit, but it's something else. Or it tries to download and install surreptitiously. The bad stuff might do any number of things like encrypt all your data and demand "registration" (ransom, really) to unlock it. Maybe it's fake antivirus, or a fake account lockout. Or it might try to "phone home" to a botnet, a centralized network of infected PC's at the beck and call of bad guys for all kinds of bad acts.

But it all starts with falling for the temptation to click that link.

Most of it, anyway.
 

Fruitbat

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Thanks, Rob. And everyone else too. :)
 

benbradley

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Basically, yes.

Remember, spam costs nothing.
More correctly, it costs nothing to the SENDER. Overall, it is a significant or substantial part of the cost of keeping email going.

I recall stories around 15 years ago of many people who would get new email addresses every few months because the one they had was getting more and more spam. The reason this doesn't happen anymore is because the spam filters are much better, and you only see a trickle of the total spam sent to you.
You pay your ISP the same amount whether you send 100 emails or 100,000 emails.
But the average ISP will likely disconnect someone if they're sending out 100,000 emails.

Spammers usually use illegal means (such as botnets) to send huge volumes (tens of millions or more) of emails.

Here's some interesting info - this page is mostly unchanged from about 15 years ago, but much of it still applies:
http://spam.abuse.net/overview/


I doubt there's someone making the sentences personally, most likely a random word generator or one of a collection of premade word jumbles.
Yes, the "word salad" is computer generated and different for each address sent to, in an effort to get through spam filters that look for the same message sent to many people.

Spam filters do work very well thesedays. This filtering is done at the ISP level, so you don't see the real torrent of spam which last I heard was over 90 percent of email traffic. Maybe one out of a few hundred get through and you see it, which should tell you the real scope of the problem.

One problem with spam filters is sometimes they filter out messages you were expecting. Often this is because the sender is on the same host as a spammer, and the ISP has the whole host blocked. Regardless of reasons, this is part of the collateral damage of spam.

Starting in the 1990s ISPs had to increase the size of their mail servers so they wouldn't crash under the increasing onslaught of spam (and if the server crashed people wouldn't get ANY of their email), and that is one of the TRUE costs of spam. All this filtering and tweaking the filters and such costs money - the cost is included in your monthly Internet bill.

Spam was always at best a grey-market business. The spammer almost certainly did something illegal to get that thing into your inbox. In the 1990s there were phishing pages to get AOL passwords that looked EXACTLY like the real AOL login page (but of course the URL wasn't aol.com), and they used those stolen accounts to send spam (among other methods). That was a minor crime compared to how it's done now.
I'd like to know why I keep getting 'pill offers' for body parts I don't own...

:D
You may already know this, but it's because you have an email address. It's cheaper to send to "all leventy-seven million email addresses we have" than to get email addresses for a target audience.
So, these people are getting paid in some way for clicks on the links they send (or it's computer generated, with the same end purpose of getting hits on a site that sells something? And then perhaps the spam emails that don't even include a link were mistakes and meant to include a link? Does that sum it up?
Basically yes. Perhaps the spam uses some encoding for the message "payload" that your email client isn't displaying for you, but in this case you can be grateful for that.

They MIGHT be getting paid directly for clicks, or that charged a fixed fee of someone else to put their URL in millions of inboxes, or they're the people selling the stuff at the URL to begin with. Or clicking the URL installs malware on your computer that causes YOUR computer to send spam, or do worse things you don't want to know about. They then rent out access to your and thousands of other computers to do their dirty deeds. Just keep your virus/malware scanner running and up to date.

This was timely when it came out, written by Roger Ebert - I just wish that every newbie to the Internet ever since had been forced to read this every day for a year:
http://www.panix.com/~tbetz/boulder.shtml

The tl;dr:
[SIZE=+3][SIZE=+2][SIZE=+1][SIZE=+3]The Boulder Pledge

[SIZE=+2]"Under no circumstances will I ever purchase anything offered to me as the result of an unsolicited e-mail message. Nor will I forward chain letters, petitions, mass mailings, or virus warnings to large numbers of others. This is my contribution to the survival of the online community." [/SIZE]
[/SIZE][/SIZE]
[/SIZE]
[/SIZE]
 
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benbradley

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Here's an interesting article "How Big Is Email?" (tl;dr it's HUGE) - it discusses spam near the end, and I'm surprised to read it's only 2/3rds of all emails, unlike what I heard 10 years ago. I suppose some of the more egregious spamhouses have been shut down over the last decade.

https://medium.com/@raindrift/how-big-is-email-305bbdb69776