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Spam sucks. Canned meat, email, all of it. What is it? Why do we get it? What can I do about it? Read on.

What is spam?

The definition of spam is argued regularly. Because I will be specifically speaking on the subject of email, we can at least narrow down the definition a little. Three categories come to mind In regard to email spam.

• Bulk – the copy of the message you received was sent out en masse to many people at once.
• Unsolicited – You never agreed to receive the message.
• Automated – There isn’t someone frantically typing all of these messages; They are automatically created by a computer.

To say that any email fulfilling one of those categories is always spam is an overstatement. I receive automated emails every day that help me do my job. To say that any email fulfilling two of those categories is somewhat accurate, but what about those messages you get from your favorite retailers informing you of a new sale. Those messages are both bulk and automated, but not spam. However, if an email fulfills all three of these categories (bulk, unsolicited, automated) you can be almost certain it is spam. What is the purpose of spam? It has many faces, but the root intent of most spam is to separate the recipients with their hard earned money.

Why is it so bad lately?

I recently heard an estimate that 9 out of 10 emails are spam. How can this be? I send out approximately 20 emails a day. That means that there are 180 equivalent spam emails going out? It used to be a few messages here and there – what happened?

Costs went down. In the beginning, spammers were using remedial programs to generate text-based messages from their own computers. All of these messages required a lot of bandwidth. Bandwidth is costly. In addition, these messages weren’t too hard to block. Nowadays, spammers use botnets. A botnet is a network of computers. These computers can be scattered all over the world. They have a backdoor maliciously inserted by a virus or worm that spammers can use to send these computers instructions. The spammer sends out one message to the botnet, and those computers (and their bandwidth) do the dirty work of replicating and redistributing. Now spammers can send out millions of emails with the cost of sending just one. With a cost that low, even if one in a million emails completes it goal, a return on the investment is made. With those kind of odds, it is too good of an opportunity to pass up. So you have accepted the fact that the emails are floating around out there. But….

Why is all this spam making it to my inbox?

Aside from adjusting your own habits, you have only two lines of defense: A spam blocking service and a junk mail filter. On the pre-delivery side, your mail provider (yahoo, Gmail, your company) usually will have some sort of frontline defense system for spam. These systems inspect email, look for emails that are suspicious, and quarantine them. In addition, you (hopefully) have a post-delivery junk mail filter enabled. This filter will perform a similar function to the pre-delivery service. Essentially, these are the same things. By using multiple filters that are updated and managed by different sources, your chances of catching and quarantining spam are significantly higher. So with all this protection in place why do you still get spam?

Filtering is essentially an uphill, losing battle. Spammers can generate emails that the filters don’t catch faster that the filter can be programmed to catch them. This is the reason they get to your inbox. When filters were able to pick up words and phrases in emails, spammers would obfuscate words to bypass the filters. Viagra became \/1agra. Those messages would bypass the filters for a while until the filters were updated to block them. Then V1agra became Viagr@. And so on so forth.

Eventually the filters became sophisticated enough to pick up almost all the patterns that spammers would send out. It seemed we would be free of this nuisance. Then the image based spam came. Spammers would display their text-based message within a graphic file. The anti-spam companies then scrambled to create scanners to inspect the attached graphics for these messages. By the time these changes were implemented, spammers had developed and implemented methods to continually change visual patterns in the graphics so the filters had no consistencies to detect. You have no doubt seen these messages, usually offering stock tips with some random images contained in the message or in the background.

By the time our filters can detect these messages, you will be looking at a message using a newer filter bypass technique. Basically we are spending millions of dollars to continually stay behind in a losing battle.

Why Stock Tips?

What happened to good ol’ Viagra ads? Viagra ads require web links, at least the ones that come from spammers who want to get paid for their work. This gives the filters an easier time to detect and quarantine the message. The stock scam is much simpler. No links required. For example, lets say I find some garbage stock selling for $0.50 a share. I buy 1000 shares of it for just $500. I then send 2 million spam messages through my botnet telling people that some up and coming company (the one I bought stock in) has some amazing advancement or just acquired some essential patent to making iPods. I am positive the stock will be worth $5 a share by the end of the week.

At first glance you think to yourself, “Who cares? No one actually clicks on that.” Wrong. You don’t; and for every one of you there are a thousand more like you. You are just an innocent bystander in this game. The spammer has no intention of trying to get you to buy into the scam. It is the 0.0001% of people who do buy into these scams that are the audience. Unfortunately, the only way to find these people is to email all of us.

Think of it this way. 90% of the people who are sent this message don’t receive it because they were able to filter it out. 90% of the people who actually get it shake their fist in the air, say “Curse these spam messages!”, and immediately delete it. 90% of the people who actually read it dismiss it as a hoax and delete it. 90% of the people who read it and don’t dismiss it don’t have the resources to buy it. And the remaining people fall for the scam. Even though 99.9999% of my emails returned no results, 200 people bought the stock. Because of the trading volume, the stock triples in price to $1.50 the next day. The people who fell for the scam are delighted! This is actually working for them. They decide to hold onto the stock until it gets to the $5.00 mark, as promised it would. Meanwhile, I sell all my shares for $1.50. By the time I have made my $1000 profit, it is discovered that it was all a hoax, and the stock has tanked. Those people are out their money and vow to never fall for this again. That’s fine, next time I’ll send out 4 million emails. Now you can see how easy this really is, why so many people do it, and thus why you have so many spam messages in your inbox.

What can I do to be part of the solution?

• Don’t believe everything you read – How true this adage holds. People you don’t know are not out to help you make money. If you believe that, I know a great place to buy Viagra….
• Get two email addresses – The more your email address floats around, the more spam you are going to get. Everyone should have two. Give one out to family, friends, and co-workers. Use the other to sign up for downloads, receive free newsletters, and “keep you up to date with news and special offers”. You can get a secondary email for free from many providers – I suggest using google or yahoo. All it will take is a few minutes of setup. I have recently discovered 10 minute mail. This is perfect for those situations when you have to give a valid email address to access a download. You can setup a temporary address, submit that address as your own, access it to get the download link, and it will cease to work after 10 minutes. It can come in quite handy.
• Don’t ever “click here to stop receiving these messages” – Finally a simple end to your misery! Not likely. All you are doing is informing the spammer that you are actually reading their emails. Now they can put you on their preferred recipient list!
• Keep your antivirus up to date – For all you know, you are sending yourself spam. It is entirely possible that your computer is part of a botnet that is causing your own frustration! Not all of the spammer programs that add you to their botnets are delivered as viruses or worms, but most are. By keeping an up-to-date firewall and virus program, you can reduce your chances of being part of the problem.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 7th, 2006 at 11:32 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.