Surely everyone has encountered spam at least once in their life. It rains down on us with enviable regularity not only from the World Wide Web, but also in real life. The same countless advertising booklets in mailboxes at the entrance irritate almost everyone. In the age of computer technology, the quality and characteristics of spam have changed significantly. It is no longer necessary to hire offline couriers, but simply find out your email address. In addition to harmless advertising of local stores with beautiful images of products and written reviews for them, spam can pose a real threat to your wallet. So you need to be extremely careful with such letters. But first things first.
From our article you will learn what spam is, what types of mailings there are and how to deal with it.
Types of spam
The essence of spam is to convey the advertised product to the end user. And it doesn’t have to be a product from a store. Some increase traffic to their sites, others work using referral systems, others distribute viral code, others warn us about the next end of the world, etc. There can be very, very many motives, varieties, and at the same time examples of spam.
This is the most common type of spam today. Everyone connected to the World Wide Web has email. Without it, it is impossible to register on social networks and other sites. Mail helps you communicate with friends, conduct business correspondence, exchange files, etc.
Most users check their email every day, some more often. Accordingly, letters arriving in the mail will most likely be read at least within 24 hours. Spammers understand this very well and use the appropriate tools for their mailings.
One of the most common examples of spam messages is a tempting offer to get rich quick. The attachment may contain graphs, screenshots of payments, videos and reviews of individuals who have already tried this service. Naturally, all this information is fake, although sometimes it looks quite convincing.
Many large email services, such as Gmail, Yahoo or Yandex, taking into account numerous examples of spam advertising, create their own filters and actively fight junk in users’ email inboxes. However, this still does not stop spammers, and they continue their ignoble work.
Social media
Many striking examples of spam text can be seen on social networks. The services “VKontakte”, “Odnoklassniki”, “Instagram”, “Facebook” and others are already completely spammed with messages, fake groups and other harmful advertising elements.
At first, businessmen distributed the texts they needed through personal messages directly from their accounts. But ordinary users, together with moderators, began to actively fight this phenomenon. Spammers did not have to wait long and began to use another, more restrictive technology.
They began to hack ordinary accounts using phishing sites (fake resources that duplicate any social network) and from there they sent their messages to the owner’s friends and subscribers. In this case, you can turn off spam only by removing the “hacked” friend from your contacts.
Forums
Forums are a number of specific resources configured for communication between one user and another. Some sites allow you to exchange not only text information, but also transfer some files: images, video, audio, etc.
There are plenty of opportunities to promote your products or services here. There are also plenty of examples of spam. The user can leave the necessary links or other mentions both in his profile, which is displayed on the site, and in discussion threads. Spammers create a seemingly normal topic on a decent forum, but only to stuff it with their links.
Administrators of such resources try to deal with such harmful elements in different ways: include pre-moderation of comments, enclose texts in nofollow tags, ban and delete suspicious accounts, etc. Some admins write or order special scripts that contain various examples of spam, and if any appears , then the message is deleted or immediately deleted by the user who left it.
Comments on websites
Here we are talking about various thematic resources and blogs. Fraudsters also actively use such sites for their dirty deeds. Among other examples of spam, we can highlight a separate and largest category of businessmen in this segment who advertise their own websites and blogs by leaving comments with links under posts.
This is necessary to increase the SSI indicator (site quality index, former TIC). The latter contributes to good search results, as well as resource monetization. It is easier to deal with such spam than in other cases. Pre-moderation of comments acts as a panacea here. Banning users by IP address and using advanced captchas also helps.
Catalogs and notice boards
Approximately the same situation as with comments on the site occurs on message boards. A striking example is the large resource “Avito”, where literally in every section you can find spam in different forms.
It can be either in the ads themselves or in ad blocks on the side or bottom. Avito is wildly popular in Russia, and you can pay for a banner that contains supposedly regular advertising, but in fact it is spam. In addition, moderators cannot cope with thousands of advertisements and cannot guarantee with 100% certainty that there will be no links or any mentions of third-party resources.
SMS
Mobile gadgets are also a haven for scammers. Spam viruses are found here very often, and of an extremely harmless nature. Some SMS can easily reset the balance of your phone or, even worse, your bank card.
Fraudsters use various tricks to achieve their goals. Out of thousands of SMS messages sent to various numbers, at least one will “hit”. As a rule, spammers ask you to send a response message disguised as a harmless procedure. For example, confirm that you are not a robot by sending an SMS to a short number. Large and reputable services and companies can be indicated as the sender: Sberbank, Gosulugi, RIA-Novosti, the same Avito and others.
How spammers build their databases
Fraudsters collect email addresses and phone numbers from all available sources. Among others, thematic forums, guest books, social networks and other resources are especially popular, where such information is poorly protected or is even publicly available in the owner’s profile. Some databases are hacked by hackers and sold on the Darknet.
In addition, personal information may be collected using software. There are special search bots - harvesters. They go through thousands of resources in an hour and carefully put all the data they receive into a database.
It is also worth taking into account the usual selection. There are billions of mailboxes registered around the world, which means that these addresses can be generated using a specially written program. The same is true for phones. It is no secret that for each Russian region, operators have allocated their own codes indicating the ownership of the number. For example, +7(918)ххх-хх-хх is the Krasnodar region with the Rostov region. Fraudsters just have to generate the remaining seven numbers and spam evil, taking into account the specifics of a particular region.
Viruses also help dishonest businessmen. Malicious code, usually worms, can send itself to a database of addresses. The information collected in this way is extremely valuable for spammers, because it only contains operational data that their owner uses.
How to get rid of spam?
Here we will consider the situation with email, because spamming of the mailbox is the main headache for most network users. Once your e-mail has entered the scammers’ database, they won’t just leave you alone.
However, you can significantly reduce the likelihood of ending up on such a list if you take simple precautions. Experienced users strongly recommend creating, in addition to the main mailbox, an additional one, or better yet several. The latter can and should be used to register on forums and other sites where you need to provide an email address.
The next point is suspicious letters. If you are asked to follow an unfamiliar link to receive a reward, complete registration, buy a yacht for a couple of thousand or something else, although you have not previously visited this site, then it is better to immediately delete the letter. It should also be noted that some scammers put a virus code on the “Unsubscribe” button.
New email
If you are going to start a new mailbox, then you should not choose a simple and easy-to-remember name for it. Make it as complex, confusing and long as possible. Memorable boxes are good for companies and other services, but for the average user they are completely useless.
You will still send it to friends electronically by copying the address. But it will be much more difficult for spam bots to generate such a complex name.
Postal services
Judging by numerous reviews from users from all over the world, the most interesting service in terms of spam filtering is Gmail. The local defense is set up quite intelligently and makes mistakes extremely rarely.
Anti-spam filters place all suspicious correspondence in the appropriate category, thereby freeing the Inbox from unnecessary advertising junk. Of course, this tool is far from ideal, but it still works noticeably more efficiently than its competing analogues.
It is also worth noting the domestic service - Yandex Mail. The filters here are very effective at sorting letters, sifting the wheat from the chaff. But many advanced users complain about the domestic mailer for the abundance of advertising blocks. Yes, it does a good job of cleaning up a wide variety of spam, but a banner here and a banner here spoil the whole impression, and some even prevent them from working properly.
In any case, if you have an e-mail registered with some third-party service, then in Gmail you can configure the interception of correspondence from any e-mail box that supports this function.
One of the most pressing problems for ordinary Internet users and website/forum owners is mass mailing.
Probably every person who has accessed the World Wide Web at least a couple of times in their life has encountered spam, for example, in order to
- find the information you need,
- download an interesting movie,
- chat with friends on social networks
- etc.
Spam can take many different forms (depending on what purpose the distributor is pursuing and what audience he is targeting).
Below we list the main types of spam:
1 Mass mailing of letters to electronic mailboxes
At the moment, almost all users with . After all, this is a kind of identifier for a person on the Internet - using mail you can:
chat with friends,
accept business letters,
on websites
etc.
Many users check their email at least once a day. Consequently, letters that end up here will most likely soon be read by a person. Spammers understand this and actively use email services to send spam.
As a rule, email spam is presented in the form of some kind of tempting or not very commercial offer (in addition to text, graphics and videos can be inserted into the letter).
Popular email services, for example, gmail, are actively fighting such spam, inventing new tools to filter out dubious emails. However, this still does not stop spammers. For them, the main thing is to obtain a database of mailing addresses, and then the rest will be a matter of little things (you just need to automatically send standard letters to all these addresses).
2 Spam on social networks
This type of spam began to appear during the rapid development of social networks and services. The more users registered here, the more active the spammers were.
Initially, spam was distributed through personal messages on social networks directly from the spammer's account. But after the owners and moderators of social networks began to actively fight this phenomenon, another technology was used.
Using specially created websites, spammers stole other people's accounts and sent spam from them. For example, spammers send a mailing to all the friends and acquaintances of the person whose account they stole. This technology, despite active defensive actions on the part of social network moderators, is still used by attackers to this day.
3 Forum spam
A forum is a special type of site where users can register, communicate with each other, reply to topics, and even create their own topics. Accordingly, spammers have much more opportunities to promote their product or their own Internet resource. A person can put the necessary links directly in his profile, can leave spam comments in the profiles of other users, send them personal messages of an advertising nature, insert links into comments on topics and create topics in the text of which a large number of left links will be inserted.
Forum administrators fight spam in different ways. For example, they enable pre-moderation of comments (they appear only after manual checking), add the nofollow attribute to all external links, block (ban) or even delete malicious spammers, etc.
There are thematic groups on VKontakte, on Facebook, on Subscribe, etc., where spammers are also active.
4 Spam in comments
This type of spam is usually present on various thematic sites and blogs. Spammers especially love those sites and blogs where the comment block is not blocked from indexing - these are the so-called Dofollow blogs.
in the body of the comment (number 2 in Fig. 1),
as well as the user who left it (number 1 in Fig. 1).
Rice. 1 Spam in comments on a website or blog There are different ways to combat this type of spam:
- use pre-moderation,
- ban annoying spammers by IP,
- attach a captcha to the comment form,
- remove the “Site” field from the comment form (the link is usually inserted into it - number 1 in Fig. 1).
5 Spam in directories and message boards
Like comment spam, this is a type of search spam (this is a set of dishonest methods and techniques used to promote a website in search engines).
A few years ago, active registration of a new resource in thematic directories could greatly help in search engine promotion and give the site a fairly large number of targeted visitors who would come from these directories.
At the moment there is very little sense in such registration. After all, search engines practically do not take into account such external links. And ordinary people almost never use catalogs to find the information they need (there are search engines for this).
Spam in directories is usually left by bloggers or SEOs themselves. But spam on message boards often bothers ordinary users. Here, for example, is the well-known bulletin board avito.ru:
Spam on a bulletin board, for example, Avito ru, can be very diverse. Below is a screenshot of such spam, which was made on the Avito ru website:
6 Spam in SMS messages
Here is an example of spam in SMS messages, which was also made on the Avito website (free message board):
Rice. 2 Spam in SMS messages Before sending an SMS in response to a fraudulent message, you should check who is the author of such a message - the official website or the scammers.
Spam is the sending of advertising letters of a political or commercial nature to people who have not subscribed to it. Spam refers to emails received on the user's email, phone, social applications such as whats app, skype and many others. Main topics letters can be different: from a visit to a resort to an offer to earn big money or receive a prize for some action that the user has never done.
The first episode of spamming took place in the nineteenth century. In 1864, British politicians received telegrams advertising dental services by telegraph. In the twentieth century, a similar term was used to designate the trademark of Hormel Foods Corporation. This there was an abbreviation SPAM stood for SPiced hAM, which translated meant “spicy ham.” After the war, advertisements about unconsumed canned food were broadcast at every turn - from the radio, newsstands, on trams and buses. There was a sketch on a television show in Britain called "SPAM". This is where the modern name comes from.
Sometimes spam turns from harmless letters into real black PR. For example, with its help, one company can denigrate another by sending Internet and telephone users some messages discrediting the latter’s reputation. With the help of such mailings, pornography, drugs and much more are advertised, which is prohibited by law.
Masked as spam money swindling. For example, a woman receives a message in the mail that her son was in an accident and asks to send money for a complex operation and the number where the savings should be sent. Those women who have never encountered such actions believe and send money. And then it turns out that the son is healthy and nothing happened to him. The types will be discussed in more detail below.
Types of spam
The most common type is advertising. With the help of advertising, companies sell services and offer goods. Such advertising is permitted at the legislative level. But many recipients are still wary.
Another type is " Nigerian letters" The name was formed due to the fact that a large number of similar messages were received in Nigeria. The recipient of such a letter is promised a large sum of money, but it is necessary to open an account and postage costs, which the scammer will supposedly pay only when the recipient sends the money to him.
Almost the same in appearance is " phishing" Allegedly, the bank administration will block the recipient's account if he does not send his details and does not confirm the data on the site under which the link to the spammers' site is hidden. This way, fraudsters will receive all the necessary data in order to transfer the money in the recipient’s account to themselves.
Letters of happiness, common among schoolchildren and adults, are also one of the varieties in our country. They are based on the requirement to forward the message to as many friends as possible. And in return, a miracle will happen in the life of the recipient in a few days. Sometimes such messages may contain negative content. For example, threaten heavenly punishment if a person does not forward a certain number of letters to friends.
All these legal and illegal actions are carried out by people called spammers. They could be mailing services, database collectors, software manufacturers, or even the average user. If a person wants to communicate something to many people without their request or consent, he automatically becomes a spammer.
This type of mailing brings benefits to the customers of letters. It is difficult to fight this species, but it is possible.
How to fight spam
You can deal with mailings yourself. If you often receive messages from a particular group or user, you can always add the person to black list and make sure that messages fall into a specially designated block. On the website mail.ru, or Yandex.Mail, it is called “Spam”.
For the user who wants to protect himself from spammers, Not recommended publish your mailing address on publicly accessible websites. Or create a special box if you have to register in unreliable groups and communities. Not recommended respond to similar messages or follow the links in them. Perhaps the link already contains a script that will block your computer or phone at best. At worst, he will gain access to your cards and bank accounts.
There is special software that protects against annoying mailings. Typically, such antispam modules are built into the antivirus or installed separately. Kaspersky Lab, Antispam, Counterspam are the best of these programs.
It is recommended to blacklist such senders on phones. Letters will arrive in separate block called "Antispam" on the phone. And if the recipient wants, he can look at it; if not, he can set it to be automatically deleted after a certain number of days.
You can find examples in the pictures below. These are like this harmless mailings also called spam on the Internet.
These are examples of mailings from ordinary users. There are entire companies, for example, computer repair, window installation, that engage in similar mailings, inserting links to their pages in user names or words. Below is an example:
What to do with spam emails
How dangerous is spam?
First of all, it is dangerous because in a pile of various mailings you will have to look for a long time for a truly useful letter from a friend or from work. By opening a spam email and clicking on the link, you expose yourself and your corporate network to infection with various viruses. Thirdly, additional load on the network.
One of the most hated things is when I receive advertising SMS messages on my phone. Especially from companies I have never purchased anything from.
Maybe I just forgot? Unlikely. It’s just that these companies don’t come up with anything smarter than buying someone else’s database and sending messages to them in the hope of quickly increasing sales.
But what makes me even angrier is the spam emails. Is this good or bad, as well as how to send spam mailings (if you decide after reading this), I will tell you in this article.
Mass mailing or ham?
“Spam” (eng. spam) - translated as mass mailing of advertising to make a profit from people who did not agree to receive it.
- Spam mailing E-mail;
- Spam sending of SMS messages;
- Spam mailing on VKontakte;
- Viber spam mailing;
- WhatsApp spam mailing.
1936
Hormel Foods Corporation (an American company) is releasing a new product - canned spicy minced pork sausage. The product was called SPiced hAM (spicy ham) or SPAM for short.
Spicy ham SPAM
After the outbreak of World War II in 1939 and the entry of the United States into it, Hormel Foods won a tender to supply the American and Allied armies with these canned foods.
One thing she didn’t calculate was that the war ended quite quickly for the United States and its allies, and therefore the company was left with huge reserves of canned food.
To sell huge reserves, SPAMa companies launched an advertising campaign of unprecedented scale.
The word SPAM and the photo of canned food were literally everywhere (on the radio, on buses, on billboards, on walls, etc.).
SPAM advertising 1969
The world famous show “Monty Python” is filming a sketch. The meaning is not very original and plays on only one situation.
A visitor to a cafe wants to order food, but faces a problem. All dishes in the cafe contain SPAM (that same spicy ham). By the way, here is the same sketch:
It was the guest’s bickering “I don’t like spam!” (I don’t like spam) and “I don’t need spam” (I don’t need spam) and the waitress constantly recommending dishes with spam, became a reference to the advertising company Hormel Foods, persistently “selling” its canned goods.
By the way, the word Spam was used more than 100 times in the show, which once again reminded people watching it of the annoying meat company commercial.
1986
In one of the first Internet networks, mass mailings of a financial pyramid began, which told how people could earn a lot of money quickly.
It was this moment that solidified in people’s minds the meaning of the word “Spam” as a mailing to which people did not express their consent.
Therefore, now, when you see a photo of a tin can with large letters “SPAM” on the Internet, you know where your legs come from.
Who needs more coverage?
The first thing we need to figure out is whether this method of promoting your product or service is right for you. Maybe the game is not worth the candle, and you will strain yourself and take risks (more on that later).
Image or money
If you are a company that plans to go on for a long time and steadily, then know that this advertising method works very poorly for your business.
At the start-up stage, many do not think about the “face of the company”, but if you look at it in the long term, then in the future spam will definitely come back to haunt you negatively.
Because nowadays the amount of noise around is simply prohibitive. Besides, no one likes it when strangers barge into their personal space without asking.
I'll sit here. I am comfortable Let me rephrase this topic. If in your field the status (level) of the company does not affect the decision, then spam is suitable for you.
If a person makes the final purchasing decision based on your image, then we can say with certainty that spam will only spoil this image.
Mass market
Of course, with spam, you can make a selection based on dozens of criteria. And this is confirmed by the ability to collect databases on certain individuals.
For example, personal mails of the heads of organizations in a specific region, or sending mailings to people located in a certain place, or companies in a certain area.
But I don’t really believe in an accurate hit, since spam mailing is a “weapon of mass destruction,” that is, it shoots at everyone.
You can order a small database to be parsed according to the criteria you need, but as a result, all people still have different selection criteria. This means they need different offers.
In addition to everything, if you have a product of mass demand, for example, tickets to a Philip Kirkorov concert, then it will be much easier for you, since this star has many more positive fans than negative ones. But again, not a targeted hit.
The numbers don't lie
- Average email deliverability is 80%;
- Average open rate - 1%;
- Average click-through rate (following a link in an email) - 3%;
- The conversion rate to a call from an email rarely exceeds 0.1%.
Out of 500 thousand, only 400 reach. Out of 400 thousand, 4 thousand people will open (the best scenario, although I strongly doubt it). Out of 4 thousand, with a conversion of 3%, 120 people will go to the site.
Now add the conversion of the gasket site (well, you understand that sending spam with a direct link to your site is suicide).
Average conversion - 5%. In total, at best, 6 people will reach your site.
You can also use any service like Getresponse, MailChimp, Pechkin.
Outsourcing via SMS messaging
In addition to official sources, there are a lot of other regular services. Any one that allows you to send SMS messages will suit you.
Just keep in mind that now all the big services require you to sign an agreement before you will be given the opportunity to send SMS. The main objective of the agreement is to shift all the blame onto you in case of a claim from the FAS.
Services are constantly appearing on the Internet that have not yet received a “kick under...” and allow sending out newsletters without a contract. For avid spammers, these types of “newbies” are a goldmine.
Outsourcing of mailings in social networks and instant messengers
With messengers everything is quite simple. There are companies that provide mailing services.
And they do it according to your criteria. It’s not difficult to find them by simply entering information in a Yandex or Google search.
The problem is that tracking deliverability is almost impossible. You may be deceived and shown a fake report. Therefore, we assemble the database ourselves and insert several of our numbers into the list for testing.
This means that for any action we have a reaction. There are craftsmen who implement spam on a huge scale. But this is a very dangerous business. I repeat.
Small nasty things
When we were young and stupid, and gaining experience in Internet marketing, we tested different ways to attract customers.
Domain Reputation
We did this first from the email info@in-scale..
And then we wondered for a long time why everything and the contracts that we sent to clients ended up in spam.
And because all mail coming from our domain, mail servers automatically began to be included in spam “for a bad reputation” and “shady dealings”. It took us a long time and literally with prayers to restore the domain’s reputation.
Morality. If you send spam, do not mention your domain anywhere.
There is a very high probability that when a domain is mentioned in letters, it will be blacklisted and then you can simply throw it away.
It’s better to create an email similar to your domain, but on a well-known mail server like mail.ru or yandex.ru.
Email deliverability
Everyone wants to know how many emails are delivered or, in professional terms, the percentage of inbox deliverability.
This is done in the following way: a small tracker is installed in the letter, which sends data to the server (a program or spam mailing service), which reads the information and reflects it in statistics.
It is because of this tracker that most spam filters of popular mail servers send them to the Spam folder.
Not using such a filter greatly increases the “survival rate” of letters. However, what can you do to know at least some statistics?
Take 5-10 mailboxes (for example, on this site), insert them randomly into the mailing list, and after the mailing is completed, calculate the statistics. Yes, it’s quite inaccurate, but at least it’s something.
Briefly about the main thing
The delivery rate of messages using such an advertising channel is no more than 80%, and the conversion to opening does not exceed 5%.
Although, of course, I made a mistake. The conversion rate of spam to email is usually between 1 and 3%.
But you can object and say that instant messengers, social networks and SMS open almost everything. You'd be right.
Then, in this case, calculate the percentage of how many people will read your offer, how many of them will take the target action and generally buy. Most likely this will be an extremely small figure.
Yet again. This is if we talk about large-scale mailing (at least 10,000 messages).