This page is really just a collection of ramblings on and about email spam..
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China Spammers - received spam email from my domain? Read the story so far...
What is Spam?Email spam is email's sent to you, typically, trying to get you to buy something. Also known as Unsolicited Commercial Email ( UCE ) or Unsolicited Bulk Mailing ( UBM ), they are sent to millions of people for little or no cost to the sender. It only takes a fraction of one percent of the receivers to actaully buy the product/service offered for the sender to make alot of money :(How did they get my email address?There are many avenues for spammers to gather addresses. If you have ever used a e-card service ( either sending or receiving ) then the website running it was probably using it to gather email addresses. They trawl web pages looking for addresses ( do you have your email address on your homepage or website? ), they use virus programs to infect peoples PC's and download the address books, mailing lists, the list goes on and on.What is backscatter?Spam will typically use a fake sender address. This is because the spammers quickly worked out that there email addresses where very quickly shutdown after they sent their spam's when people started to complain.They then started using other peoples addresses as the sender address in the hope that they would bypass any anti-spam measures. Backscatter is the bounce notifications you receive when a spam is sent, in your name, that hits an email address that no longer exists. The recieving mail server will try and respond to, what it thinks, is the sender telling them the email could not be delivered. Don't bother replying to these bounce messages as they are automatically generated by the mail servers and no human will read your reply. What can I do?Most mail client software comes with Anti-Spam features these days - ensure yours is turned on!Reporting spam is also a good idea and there are a number of systems to help you do this. Any Further info?And here's the link section! :)
Wikipedia - Better explanation of spam ;)
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