Email Spam
Email spam is not only annoying, but also dangerous for users. So what is email spam? Email spam is nothing but junk email or unwanted bulk emails sent through the email system. It refers to the use of an email system to send unsolicited emails, especially promotional emails, to a group of recipients. Unsolicited emails mean that the recipient has not been granted permission to receive those emails.
The use of spam emails has become more and more popular in the last decade and is a problem that most email users face. The email IDs of users who receive spam emails are usually received by spambots, automated software that crawls the Internet looking for email addresses.
Email spam is still a problem even today and is still treated as spam by spammers. Spam accounts for the billions of emails sent every day, accounting for 98% of all emails. Spam generates billions of dollars in business every year. Although antivirus software has come a long way, infected PCs, Trojans, and bots are still the main sources of spam.
There are billions of public IP addresses available for use, each of which could be home to thousands of computers, including potentially infected Trojans and bots. Since new computers are regularly infected, even some of the best reputation lists, such as the SpamRats list with its 70 million listed IP addresses, can only target a small fraction of those billion addresses.
In the time it takes for spam filters to parse the contents of an email message, figure out the source of the email, and then blacklist the IP address, you would have already allowed email spam on your system. Spam e-mail, also known as junk mail, is suspicious messages sent via e-mail.
Most spam emails are commercial in nature. They contain links that look genuine and reassuringly familiar, but the links lead to phishing websites hosting malware. The concept of spam emails first appeared in the early 1990s. Reports indicate that a network of computers or botnets infected with malware is being used to send spam.
Spambots are used by spammers to obtain the email addresses of targeted victims and send malicious emails to the resulting list of email addresses. Although the spammer sends emails to millions of email addresses, only a few will reply or send a message.
Types of Email Spam
Email spam comes in many different types.
The most common of all are spam emails, which are marketing campaigns in disguise to promote a business.
It could be promoting weight loss programs, job offers, and even any clothing brand with incredible deals. Spammers use spam mailing lists for email scams. Fraudulent spam comes in the form of phishing emails, basically looking like official messages from banks or any other online payment processor.
Phishing emails are created in order to direct victims to a fake organization website that is malicious while the user ends up giving all personal information such as login credentials, financial details to the spammer, having access to a malicious website.
