Spam

A KMail folder filled with unwanted mails received in a short period

The term junk mail (in English: spam), also called junk mail or unsolicited mail, refers to unsolicited, unwanted or unknown sender email messages (or even anonymous or false sender email), usually of an advertising nature, generally sent in large amounts (even massive) that harm the recipient in one or more ways. The action of sending such messages is called spamming or unwanted diffusion. The equivalent word in English, spam, comes from the time of World War II, when relatives of soldiers at war sent them canned food; among these canned foods was a canned meat called spam, which in the United States was and still is very common. This term began to be used in computing decades later when it became popular, thanks to a 1970s sketch of the British comedy troupe Monty Python, in their television series Monty Python's Flying Circus, which included spam on all plates.

Although spam can be generated in different ways, the most widely used among the general public is email-based. Other internet technologies that have been subject to spam include newsgroups, discussion systems, search engines, social networks, web pages, wikis, forums, blogs, through pop-up windows and all kinds of images and text on the web. Web.

Spam can also target mobile phones (via text messages) and instant messaging systems such as Outlook, Lotus Notes, WhatsApp, Gmail, etc.

Spam is also called spam to viruses released on the network and filtered pages (casino, sweepstakes, prizes such as trips, drugs, software and pornography), is activated by entering web pages communities or groups or access links on various pages or even without first accessing any type of advertising pages.

History

Spam via email service was born on March 5, 1994. On this day a law firm, Canter and Siegel, posts on Usenet a message advertising their law firm; the day after publication, he billed close to $10,000 for cases from his friends and network readers. Since then, email marketing has grown to levels unimagined since its inception.

Although there are other versions that date its origin to May 3, 1978, when 393 employees of ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet managed by the US government, received an email from the computer company DEC inviting them to launch a new product.

Fax junk mail (junk faxes) is another category of this direct marketing technique, and consists of sending unsolicited mass faxes through automated electronic systems to thousands of people or companies whose information has been been loaded into segmented databases according to different variables.

Etymology

The term spam was widespread before the advent of electronic media, used to refer to physical mail of little or no use. The word spam has American roots. The American delicatessen company Hormel Foods launched in 1937 a canned meat originally called Hormel's Spiced Ham. Spam (from the contraction of "Spiced Ham", in Spanish "ham with spices") was the food of Soviet and British soldiers in World War II, and since 1957 it was marketed in cans that saved the consumer the use of can opener.

Later, the British group Monty Python began making fun of corned beef. In a sketch from his show Monty Python's Flying Circus, when a couple tried to order food at a diner, they found that every item on the menu contained spam >: «Eggs and bacon; eggs, sausage and bacon; eggs with spam; eggs, sausage, bacon and spam; spam, bacon, sausage and spam; spam, eggs, spam, spam”, and so on. A group of Vikings (the largest spam producer in Europe was a Danish company) chanted, for no apparent reason: "spam, spam, spam, dear spam, wonderful spam".

Years later, as the Internet began to grow, some inexperienced users would mistakenly send personal messages to entire email lists or discussion groups—which could involve several hundred people—causing hassle and wasted time (and even money) to the other users who received that irrelevant and unwanted traffic. According to Brad Templeton, around 1993 someone described these unwanted intrusions as spam: the messages were like the spam of the sketch, in which nothing you could eat it without running into the stiff.

Spam in different media

Spam in Posts

It's a relatively new spamming technique, emerging in places like blog posts. It consists of leaving a comment on an entry, which generally has nothing to do with it, but has links to commercial sites, or promotes a product.

Spam in Email

Mass mail currently accounts for most of the electronic messages exchanged on the Internet, being used to advertise products and services of dubious quality. Rolex, eBay and Viagra are the message subjects competing for the top spot in spam rankings.

Usually the messages indicate a false address as the sender of the mail. For this reason, it is useless to reply to spam messages: the replies will be received by users who have nothing to do with them. For now, the email service cannot identify messages in such a way that it can discriminate the sender's real email address from a false one. This situation, which may be shocking at first, is similar, for example, to that which occurs with ordinary postal mail: nothing prevents putting a random sender address on a letter or postcard: the mail will arrive, in any case. However, there are technologies developed in this direction: for example, the sender can sign his messages using public key cryptography.

Automatic antispam filters analyze the content of messages looking for, for example, words like rolex, viagra, and sex which are the most common in spam messages. It is not recommended to use these words in email correspondence: the message could be classified as spam by automatic anti-spam systems.^{[citation required]} Other reasons The reasons why antispam filters can classify a message as spam is the use of aggressive language, or the use of capital letters in the subject line. It is also not recommended to send too many attachments. One solution to this last point is to share via links to the cloud.

Forum Spam

The spam, within the context of forums, is when a user posts something that distorts or has nothing to do with the topic of conversation. Also, in some cases, a message that does not contributes in any way to the topic is considered spam. A third form of forum spamming is when a person repeatedly posts messages about a particular topic in a way that is undesirable (and probably annoying) to the majority of the forum. Finally, there is also the case in which a person posts messages solely in order to increase their rank, level or number of messages in the forum.

The spam in an Internet forum also occurs when a user posts comments that contain links or some type of reference to a similar website or forum, with the same content, or even foreign to it., as well as any other typical advertising objective with the aim of attracting more users and visitors to it.

Lately, special threads dedicated to spam are being opened, so that users who want to post do not slow down the other threads. These threads dedicated to spam have gained real importance and are widely used, so much so that some forums, after having them for a long time, decided to eliminate them due to the fact that on many occasions these subforums or topics were much more used. than the rest of the parts of the main forum, that is, while in spam more than 50 daily messages were posted, in some cases, in the rest of the sections barely 2 or 3 publications were achieved. From here, new movements have been awakened, which have developed online communities dedicated 100% to spam, such as spamfestuy and espamearte, among the oldest.

Spam on social networks

It is a new form of spam that consists of sending advertising, job offers, advertising directly to users of professional social networks without their having requested it or in the forums of the social network.

Two examples of corporate spam in this industry are sending unsolicited invitations to Facebook users' contacts, and "autoresponding" with advertising that is done randomly from MSN Hotmail when someone sends a message to a mailbox of said corporation.

Spam on IRC networks

As old as the IRC protocol itself, spam in online chat networks is booming as a result of the massification of said means of communication. Unwanted messages on IRC networks have a negligible cost and are therefore the main target of content distribution networks. The most common messages are usually aimed at visiting other chat channels, visiting websites and generally disseminating paid content. Recently, the appearance of a new type of spam that seeks to get the user receiving the advertising to use mobile telephony to contract high-cost services has been confirmed. This practice is punishable by law. On many occasions this activity is carried out by robots under attractive pseudonyms to attract the user's attention. Names like 'joven_guapa' or 'busco_amor'.

Junk Mail in Postal Mail

The techniques of advertising bombardment have also reached the conventional media. The huge relative drop in the costs of printing on paper, from a single-page brochure to an advertising catalog of several dozen, have also meant that unsolicited mail arrives through postal mail. In a similar way to what happens in the electronic media, where a user interested in a product who sends his data to a company may find himself bombarded by unwanted advertising from that or another company, there are companies specialized in massive and indiscriminate advertising mailing. It is common to find in the mailbox unsolicited advertising introduced en masse by specialized companies or by the final distributors themselves. These access the mailboxes both on public roads, as well as mailboxes located in private areas.

Spam on public roads

Spam practices are also common on public roads, especially in cities. The placement of advertising in places not prepared for it supposes a serious deterioration of the urban environment: walls, posts, vehicles are invaded by unsolicited advertising that not in a few cases ends up on the ground. Municipal corporations lose a lot of money from these illegal practices that are exempt from fiscal control and also invest large amounts of money in the removal and cleaning of advertising material scattered in the media. In recent years, the so-called "pegatinazo" has spread, a practice consisting of placing stickers with advertising on street furniture and buildings (locksmith, plumbing and electricity services are the most common) using stickers with highly adhesive powerful and that break if they are removed, making their removal difficult and more expensive.^{[citation required]}

Spam on wikis

On wikis, users often spam other users' discussions, blogs (both creating and commenting) or comments on an article's talk page. Mostly this is about vandalism, but sometimes users are asking for help to make another wiki progress. The bad intention does not always appear, as you can see, but it is still annoying for others.

Spam in chats

In social media chats, groups, instant messaging, etc. Spam consists of repetitively putting the same thing or writing about the same topic in a chat in such a way that it is not possible to read the messages of the other members of the chat, causing a mountain of messages from the same sender, mental stress, messages that may be of an advertising nature or chain messages of entertainment or misinformation.

《Not to be confused with flood.》

Techniques for using spam

Getting email addresses

Spamers (whether individuals or companies) use a variety of techniques to get the long lists of email addresses they need for their activity, usually through robots or automated programs that scour the Internet for addresses. Some of the main sources of addresses to later send spam are:

• Websites themselves, which often contain the direction of their creator, or of their visitors (in forums, blogs, etc.).
• Usenet news groups, whose messages usually include the sender's address.
• Mail lists: you can simply sign up and write down the addresses of your users.
• Emails with jokes, chains, etc. that internet users usually forward without hiding the addresses, and that they can accumulate dozens of addresses in the body of the message, being able to be captured by a Trojan or, more rarely, by a malicious user.
• Pages where your email address is requested (or "your friends" to send them the page in an email) to access a certain service or download.
• WHOIS databases.
• Illegal entry on servers.
• By trial and error: addresses are generated randomly, and then checked if the messages have arrived. A usual method is to make a list of domains, and add regular "prefixes". For example, for Wikipedia.org, try info@Wikipedia.org, webmaster@Wikipedia.org, staff@Wikipedia.orgetc.

Sending messages

SPAM Cycle
(1): Spammers website
(2): Spammer
(3): Spamware
(4): infected computers
(5): Virus or Trojan
(6): Mail servers
(7): Users
(8): Web traffic.

Once they have a large number of valid email addresses (in the sense that they exist), spammers use programs that go through the list sending the same message to all addresses. This supposes a minimum cost for them, but harms the recipient (financial and time losses) and the Internet in general, since a large part of the bandwidth is consumed by spam messages.

Receipt verification

In addition, it is common for the spammer to control which addresses work and which do not by means of web bugs or small images or the like contained in the HTML code of the message. In this way, each time someone reads the message, their computer requests the image from the sender's server, which automatically records the fact. They are one more form of spyware. Another system is to promise in messages that by sending a message to an address you will stop receiving them: when someone answers, it means not only that they have opened it, but that they have read it.

Trojans and zombie computers

Recently, they have started to use a much more pernicious technique: the creation of Trojan viruses that spread massively through unprotected computers (without firewalls). Thus, the infected computers are used by the sender of mass mail as "zombie computers", which send spam at their command, being able to even crawl hard drives or new emails (especially chains) in search of more addresses. This can cause damage to the user who is unaware that they have been infected (who need not notice anything strange), being identified as a spammer by the servers they unknowingly send spam to, which can lead to not being allowed to spam. access certain pages or services. Thus, with the bandwidth of all the infected computers, they can easily send spam without the users themselves knowing, and they can even send a virus to the computer of a major company.

It is estimated that this type of spam can represent approximately 40% of those that are sent.

Misconfigured mail servers

Incorrectly configured mail servers are also exploited by spammers. Specifically, those configured as open relay. These do not require a username and password to be used to send emails. There are different public databases stored by computers directly connected to the Internet that allow its use by the aforementioned senders. The best known is the Open Relay DataBase.

Measures to prevent spam

Although there are no foolproof techniques to protect yourself from spam, computer security experts recommend a series of actions to reduce the amount of spam:

• Use an image for the email address.
• Instead of linking to your account, use a redirect (may be temporary or a number of uses), and delete it when you receive excessive unwanted messages.
• Modify the address to avoid automatic tracking.

In newsgroups and mailing lists:

• Do not put the true sender in the publications sent.
• If the message file to the list is visible from the web, change the addresses from a picture, hide them, or write them so that it is difficult to recognize it as such for a program.
• To avoid unwanted mail on a list:
  • The forum may be moderate, to avoid inappropriate messages.
  • Reject emails from unsubscribed users to the list.
  • Use the mail key exclusively for this. Do not use it on any other page.

Projects and services against spam

Anti-SPAM cartel.

• SPF: technology created to verify that mail message senders are who they claim to be.
• DomainKeys: another technology that serves the same as SPF and also ensures that email messages have not been modified.
• SenderID: Microsoft technology that intends to compete with SPF, even using those same acronyms for a technology that in practice is different. In fact, SenderID uses SPF-like DNS queries only as a first step in its process, which also involves content-based anti-spam filters. SenderID has been adopted by Hotmail. In practice, this requires adopting this technology or being excluded from these addresses, which account for about 260 million users worldwide. However, the results of their technology, and/or other parallel measures adopted, are causing serious problems in whole domains around the world.
• Projects such as the Harvester project and the emailharvest collect the IPs of garbage generators to block them through a trap. They put mail addresses that indicate the address of the mass mail sender and when he sends a message to that address it is known from what direction it was captured, so it can filter the sender.
• Temporary redirects.

Legislation

Spain

In Spain, unsolicited email is strictly prohibited by the Law on Services of the Information Society and Electronic Commerce (LSSICE), published in the Official State Gazette on July 12, 2002, except as provided in the art. 19.2. "In any case, Organic Law 15/1999, of December 13, on the Protection of Personal Data, and its implementing regulations, will apply, especially with regard to obtaining personal data, the information to interested parties and the creation and maintenance of personal data files”.

In fact, the sentences in Spain referring to unsolicited email are related to this law. However, said law does not mention the word spam, but rather the name "commercial communications sent by electronic means".

More recently, in Spain it is possible to report mass mail to the Spanish Agency for Data Protection, which is competent to prosecute it, in case the spam is of Spanish origin. This practice is sanctioned in Article 19.2, which provides that the LOPD and article 21 of Law 34/2002, of July 11, on Information Services, shall be applicable to everything related to the sending of electronic communications. the Information and Electronic Commerce Society (LSSI) which provides:

Prohibition of commercial communications through e-mail or equivalent electronic media.

1. It is prohibited to send advertising or promotional communications by e-mail or other equivalent electronic media that have previously not been requested or expressly authorized by the recipients of such communications.
2. The provisions of the above paragraph shall not apply when a previous contractual relationship exists, provided that the provider has obtained the contact details of the recipient and used them for the sending of commercial communications concerning the products or services of his own company that are similar to those that were initially contracted with the client.

In any case, the provider should provide the recipient with the possibility of opposing the processing of his or her data for promotional purposes through a free simple procedure, both at the time of collecting the data and at each of the commercial communications he or she directs.

The sanctioning regime of the LSSI classifies the infractions by SPAM in:

• Serious breaches:

... (c) The mass shipment of commercial communications by e-mail or other equivalent electronic means of communication or the sending, within one year, of more than three commercial communications by means of the same addressee, where such shipments do not meet the requirements set out in Article 21.

• Mild violations:

... (d) The sending of commercial communications by e-mail or other equivalent electronic means of communication when such shipments do not meet the requirements of Article 21 and do not constitute a serious violation.

And finally it establishes the following sanctions:

• Rule 39. Sanctions.

1. The following penalties shall be imposed by the commission of the offences referred to in the preceding article:

(a) For the commission of grave breaches, fine 150 001 until 600 000 Euros. (b) For the commission of grave breaches, fine 30 001 until 150 000 Euros.

(c) For the commission of minor offences, fine up 30 000 Euros.

• Article 45. Prescriptionwith respect to the statute of limitations of offences:

The very serious offences shall prescribe at three years, the serious at two years and the slight at six months, the penalties imposed for very serious offences shall be prescribed at three years, those imposed for serious faults at two years and those imposed for minor offences per year.

United States

In the United States, the CAN-SPAM law was enacted, which has been practically ineffective.

Mexico

In Mexico, junk mail was recognized in 2000, ratified and declared illegal in 2004 in article 17 of the Federal Consumer Protection Law.