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Why do Spammers Spam?

Simple; there’s potential money in it.

Spammers send out their messages in the millions in the hope that a few people reply. Income is
gained from actual products sold, or a percentage commission from products sold. Response rates
and profit margins are typically low – but so are the costs. Tools and mailing lists for sending spam
are cheap and easy to use.

The millions of messages spammers can send in a day can add up to significant revenues with even
the most modest response rates. For example, with a $1 per unit profit margin, and only a 0.1%
response rate, a spammer could make $10,000 by sending 10 million email messages.
All a spammer needs to send spam is the following:

• An email address list. These can be bought cheaply on a CD, or harvested (see below)
• Spamming software. This is inexpensive and easily obtained over the Internet
• An email server. To hide their identities, spammers often piggyback on top of an unsuspecting
third party's mail servers and relay spam through them. These servers are known as open relay
servers. You can test whether your email server is an open relay by visiting
www.abuse.net/relay.html.
• A financial opportunity. There seems to be no shortage of opportunities for spammers. Common
spam topics include product sales, memberships to adult websites and investment advice to name
a few. It’s quite amazing what spammers will try to sell you; here is an example of an actual
spam subject line: “Lose Unwanted Weight By Taking A Shower” – enough said.

A spammer has several underhanded methods of collecting email addresses. Here are some of the
most prevalent:

8 ways spammers can get your email address
1. From user registrations at unscrupulous sites
2. From user newsgroup postings
3. From user chat sessions
4. From spambots that crawl the web for any @ sign
5. From email lists the spammer buys
6. From mailing lists to which users subscribe
7. By randomly generating name combinations for your domain
8. By harvesting all the email addresses on your company's server
The

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Also see: [ Anti Spam Software ] [ What is Spam? ]