Unsolicited Bulk Email
Here are the definitions of a few spam related terms:
Definitions
Acquaintance SPAM: Unsolicited email sent to people that had previous contact with you as a business operator: old customers, subscribers to one of your newsletters etc.
Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE): is an email sent to large numbers of recipients without their knowledge or consent, often advertising commercial products or services. It is the electronic equivalent of paper junk mail.
Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE): is any commercial electronic mail message sent, often in bulk, to a consumer without the consumer’s prior request or consent. The low cost of sending UCE distinguish it from other forms of unsolicited marketing.
Junk Email :Apart from UBE/UCE, junk email can also be an automatically-sent message by someone’s virus-infected computer that has your address in the contact list. UBE and UCE can also be considered junk email.
Spam: Every email in the previous cathegories.
How do spammers get email addresses
Spammers have several ways of acquiring a person’s e-mail address. Once they have it, they can start inundating you with unwelcome mail.
- From web pages. Spammers have programs which spider through web pages, looking for email addresses, e.g. email addresses contained in “mail to”.
- From posts to UseNet. There are programs that just look at articles headers which contain email address while other programs look at signatures, through programs that take everything that contain a “@” character.
- From mailing lists. Regularly the spammers attempt to get the lists of subscribers to mailing lists, knowing that the majority of e-mail addresses are valid.
- From different web forms. There are sites that request various details via forms. Spammers can get email addresses from these form because the form becomes available on the Internet.
- From chat rooms. Many spammers collect e-mail addresses from different chat rooms, knowing that those are “live” addresses and send spam to those email addresses.
- Buying lists from others.
- From messages you sent privately to friends if they forward your note to a large group.
These resulting lists of addresses are often collected by list merchants (typically spammers) who then sell the lists to other spammers.
How can you reduce the amount of UBE?
- Avoid to use your e-mail address in the header of postings made to news groups.
- Avoid to post your real email address in a public forum.
- Avoid to put your real email address on a web page.
- Avoid to type your email address in on-line registration forms.
- Never reply to a spam message.
- Remove yourself from on-line directories that keep lists of Internet user’s names and email addresses.
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