One of the most actual problems for ordinary Internet users and owners of sites / forums is mass mailing.

Probably every person who at least a couple of times in his life went to the World Wide Web, for example, in order to

• find the information you need
• download interesting movie
• chat with friends in in social networks
• etc.

Spam can take the most different shape(Depending on what purpose its distributor pursues and what audience it focuses on).

Below are the main types of spam:

1 Mass mailing of letters to e-mail boxes

On this moment Almost all users with . After all, this is a kind of person identifier on the network - using mail, you can:
chat with friends,
receive business letters
on sites
etc.

Many users check their email at least once a day. Therefore, letters that get here will most likely be read by a person soon. Spammers understand this and actively use email services to send spam.

As a rule, email spam is presented in the form of some tempting or not very commercial offer (in addition to the text, graphics and videos can be inserted into the email).

Popular mail services, such as gmail, are actively fighting such spam, coming up with new tools to screen out dubious emails. However, this still does not stop spammers. For them, the main thing is to get a database of postal addresses, and then the matter will be small (you just need to automatically send standard letters to all these addresses).

2 Social media spam

This type of spam began to appear during the rapid development of social networks and services. The more users registered here, the more active spammers worked.

Initially, spam was distributed through private 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.

With the help of specially created sites, spammers stole other people's accounts and sent spam from them. For example, spammers send messages to all friends and acquaintances of the person whose account they stole. This technology, despite the active defensive actions on the part of social network moderators, is used by attackers to this day.

3 Forum spam

A forum is a special kind of site where users can register, chat with each other, reply to topics, and even create their own topics. Accordingly, spammers have much more opportunities for PR of 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 private messages of an advertising nature, insert links in comments on topics and create topics in the text of which a large number of left links will be inserted.

Forum administrators fight spam different ways. For example, they enable pre-moderation of comments (they appear only after manual verification), add the nofollow attribute to all external links, block (ban) or even delete malicious spammers, etc.

Eat thematic groups VKontakte, Facebook, Subscribe, etc., where spammers are also active.

4 Spam in comments

This type of spam, as a rule, is present on various thematic sites and blogs. Spammers especially love those sites and blogs where the block with comments is not closed from indexing - these are the so-called Dofollow blogs.

in the body of the comment (number 2 in Fig. 1),

as well as to the user who left it (number 1 in Fig. 1).

Rice. 1 Spamming comments on a website or blog

There are several ways to deal with such spam:

• use premoderation,
• ban annoying spammers by IP,
• attach captcha to the comment form,
• remove the "Site" field from the commenting form (the link is usually inserted into it - the number 1 in Fig. 1).

5 Spam in directories and bulletin boards

Like comment spam, this is a type of search spam (this is a set of dishonest methods and techniques used to promote a site 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 from such registration. After all, search engines practically do not take into account such external links. Yes and simple people almost do not use catalogs to find the necessary information (there are search engines for this).

Spam in directories is usually left by bloggers themselves or SEO-optimizers. But spam on bulletin boards often "gets" ordinary users. Here, for example, is the well-known bulletin board avito.ru:

Spam on the 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 is also made on the Avito website (free bulletin board):

Rice. 2 Spam in SMS messages

Before sending SMS in response to a fraudulent message, you should check who is the author of such a message - the official website or scammers.

One of the most hated is when I get promotional texts on my phone. Especially from companies I've never bought anything from.

Maybe I just forgot? Unlikely. It's just that these companies do not 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 pisses me off even more is the spam emails. For better or worse, and also how to make a spam mailing (if you still decide after reading) I will tell in this article.

Mass mailing or ham?

“Spam” (English spam) - is translated as a mass mailing of advertising to make a profit from people who did not agree to receive it.

1. Spam sending E-mail;
2. Spam sending of SMS messages;
3. Spam mailing Vkontakte;
4. Spam mailing Viber;
5. Spamming whatsapp.

1936

Hormel Foods Corporation (an American company) launches a new product - canned spicy minced pork sausage. The product was named 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 the tender to supply the American army and the Allied army with these canned food.

One thing she did not calculate, the war for the United States and the allies ended quickly enough and therefore the company had huge stocks of canned food.

In order to sell the huge stocks of SPAMa companies launched an advertising campaign of unprecedented scale.

The word SPAM and the picture of canned food were literally everywhere (on the radio, on buses, on billboards, on walls, etc.).

SPAM advertising

1969

The world-famous Monty Python show is filming a sketch. The meaning is not too original and beats only one situation.

A visitor who has come to a cafe wants to order food, but is faced with a problem. All dishes in the cafe contain SPAM (spicy ham). By the way, here's the 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, all the time recommending dishes with spam, and became a reference to the advertising company Hormel Foods, persistently "steaming" their canned food.

By the way, the word Spam was used more than 100 times in the show, which once again reminded people watching it of an annoying advertisement for a meat company.

1986

In one of the first Internet networks, mass mailings of a financial pyramid began, which told how people can earn fast and a lot of money.

It was this moment that became the consolidation in the minds of people of the meaning of the word “Spam”, as a mailing list to which people did not express their consent.

So now, when you see a photo of a tin can with large letters “SPAM” on the net, you know where the legs grow from.

Who needs more reach?

The first thing we need to figure out is whether this way of promoting your product or service is right for you. Maybe the game is not worth the candle, but you will overstrain and take risks (more on that later).

image or money

If you are a company that plans to go for a long time and steadily, then you should know that this method of advertising does not work very well for your business.

At the start-up stage, many do not think about the “face of the company”, but if you look at the long term, then in the future, spam will definitely backfire on you negatively.

Because in our time, the amount of noise around is simply prohibitive. In addition, no one likes when strangers tumble 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 suits you.

If a person makes the final purchase decision due to your image, then we can say with accuracy that spam will only spoil this image.

mass market

Of course, with spam, you can make a selection according to dozens of criteria. And this is confirmed by the ability to collect bases on certain individuals.

For example, personal mails of heads of organizations in a particular region, or mailing to people located in a certain place, or companies in a certain area.

But I do not really believe in an exact hit, since spam mailing is a “weapon of mass destruction”, that is, firing at everyone in a row.

You can order to parse a small database according to the criteria you need, but as a result, all people still have different selection criteria. So they need different offers.

In addition, 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 much more positive fans than negative ones. But again, not a point hit.

The numbers don't lie

1. Average email deliverability - 80%;
2. Average open rate - 1%;
3. Average click-through rate (following a link in an email) - 3%;
4. Conversion 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 alignment, although I strongly doubt it). Out of 4 thousand, with a conversion of 3%, 120 people will go to the site.

And now add the conversion of the shim site (well, you understand that sending spam with a direct link to your site is suicide).

Average conversion - 5%. In total, 6 people will reach your site at best.

You can also use any service like Getresponse, MailChimp, Pechkin.

SMS Outsourcing

In addition to official sources, there are many other common services. Any one that allows you to make SMS mailings is suitable for you.

Just keep in mind, now all the big services require signing a contract before you will be given the opportunity to send SMS. The main task of the agreement is, in the event of a claim from the FAS, to shift all the blame onto you.

Services are constantly appearing on the Internet that have not yet received a “kick under ...” and allow you to do mailing without a contract. For avid spammers, these newbies are a goldmine.

Outsourcing for mailing 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. Finding them is not difficult, just by entering information in a Yandex or Google search.

The problem is that it's almost impossible to track deliverability. You can be deceived and shown a fake report. Therefore, we collect the database ourselves and insert several of our numbers into the list for the test.

So for every action we have a reaction. There are craftsmen who implement spam on a huge scale. But this is a very dangerous business. I repeat.

petty nasty things

When we were young and dumb, and gaining experience in Internet marketing, we tested different ways to attract customers.

Domain reputation

We did it first from the mail [email protected]

And then we wondered for a long time why everything and the contracts that we sent to customers ended up in spam.

And because all the mail coming from our domain, mail servers automatically began to spam "for a bad reputation" and "dark dealings." We restored the reputation of the domain for a very long time and literally with prayers.

Morality. If you send spam, do not mention your domain anywhere.

It is very likely that when a domain is mentioned in emails, it will be blacklisted and then it can simply be thrown away.

It is better to start mail similar to your domain, but on a well-known mail server such as mail.ru or yandex.ru.

Email deliverability

Everyone wants to know how many emails are getting delivered or, in professional terms, the inbox deliverability percentage.

This is done as follows - a small tracker is installed in the letter, which sends data to the server (program or spam mailing service), which reads the information and reflects it in the 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 “survivability of letters”. However, what to 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, count the statistics. Yes, it's rather inaccurate, but at least something.

Briefly about the main

The delivery rate of messages using such an advertising channel is no more than 80%, and the conversion to open does not exceed 5%.

Although, of course, I messed up. Spam-to-mail conversions typically range from 1 to 3%.

But you can object and say that messengers, social networks and SMS open almost everything. You will be right.

Then, in this case, count the percentage of how many people will read your offer, how many of them will take the target action and generally buy. It will most likely be a very small number.

Yet again. This is if we talk about a large-scale mailing (at least from 10,000 messages).

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 the mailboxes at the entrance annoy almost everyone. In the age of computer technology, the quality and characteristics of spam have changed markedly. It is no longer necessary to hire offline couriers, but it is enough just to 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 be 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 is the essence of spam, what types of mailings are there 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 on referral systems, others spread 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.

Email

This is the most common form of spam today. Everyone who is connected to the World Wide Web has e-mail. Without it, it is impossible to register on social networks and on other sites. Mail helps you communicate with friends, conduct business correspondence, share files, etc.

Most users check their email every day, and some much more often. Accordingly, letters that get to the mail are likely to be read at least within a day. Spammers are well aware of this and use the appropriate tools for their mailings.

One of the most common examples of a spam message is a tempting offer to get rich quick. The attachment may contain charts, screenshots of payments, videos and reviews of individuals who have already tried this service. Naturally, all this information is fake, although it sometimes looks quite convincing.

Many large mail 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 boxes. Nevertheless, 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 of VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, Instagram, Facebook and others are already spammed through with messages, fake groups and other harmful advertising elements.

At first, the dealers distributed the texts they needed through personal messages directly from their accounts. But ordinary users, together with moderators, began to actively fight against this phenomenon. Spammers did not keep themselves waiting long and began to use a different, tougher technology.

They began to hack ordinary accounts using phishing sites (fake resources duplicating any social network) and from them 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 series of specific resources configured for communication of some users with others. Some sites allow you to exchange not only text information, but also transfer some files: images, video, audio, and so on.

There are a lot of opportunities for PR of your products or services. 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 the discussion threads. Spammers create a seemingly normal topic on a decent forum, but only to stuff it with their links.

The administrators of such resources are trying to deal with such harmful elements in various ways: they include pre-moderation of comments, enclose texts in nofollow tags, ban and delete suspicious accounts, etc. Some admins write or order special scripts that collect various examples of spam, and if it appears , then the message is deleted or immediately - the user who left it.

Website comments

Here we are talking about various thematic resources and blogs. Fraudsters also actively use such sites for their unclean deeds. Among other examples of spam, one can distinguish a separate and largest category of dealers in this segment, who advertise their own websites and blogs by leaving comments with links under the posts.

This is necessary to raise the IQS indicator (site quality index, former TIC). The latter contributes to good search results, as well as monetization of the resource. It is easier to deal with such spam than in other cases. Pre-moderation of comments acts as a panacea here. It also helps to ban users by IP address and use advanced captchas.

Catalogs and bulletin boards

Approximately the same situation, as with comments on the site, occurs on bulletin boards. A striking example is the large Avito resource, where literally in every section you can find spam in various forms.

It can be both in the ads themselves and in ad units on the side or bottom. Avito is wildly popular in Russia, and you can pay for a banner that supposedly contains regular advertising, but in reality it is spam. In addition, moderators cannot cope with thousands of ads and cannot guarantee with 100% probability that there will be no links or any mention of third-party resources.

SMS

Mobile gadgets are also an expanse for scammers. Spam viruses are very common here, and extremely harmless. Some SMS can easily reset your phone balance or worse - bank card.

Fraudsters go to different tricks to achieve their goals. Out of a thousand SMS sent to a variety of numbers, at least one will “shoot”. As a rule, spammers ask to send a response message disguised as a harmless procedure. For example, confirm that you are not a robot by sending 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 Bases

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 in the owner's profile in the public domain. Some databases are hacked by hackers and sold on the Darknet.

In addition, the collection of personal information may be carried out programmatically. There are special search bots - harvesters. They go through thousands of resources in an hour and neatly add all the received data to the database.

It is also worth taking into account the usual selection. Billions of mailboxes are registered around the world, which means that with the help of a specially written program, you can generate these addresses. 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 Krasnodar region With Rostov region. The scammers are left to generate the remaining seven digits and spam evil, already taking into account the specifics of a particular region.

Viruses also help dishonest businessmen. Malicious code, usually worms, can send itself to the address base. The information collected in this way is extremely valuable for spammers, because it contains only work data that is used by their owner.

How to get rid of spam?

Here we will consider the situation with e-mail, because mailbox spamming is the main headache for most network users. After your e-mail got into the database of scammers, they will not leave you just like that.

However, it is possible to significantly reduce the likelihood of being included in such a list by taking simple precautions. Experienced users strongly recommend starting, in addition to the main mailbox, an additional one, and preferably several. The latter can and should be used to register on forums and other sites where you need to specify an email address.

The next point is suspicious letters. If you are asked to follow an unfamiliar link in order to receive a reward, complete registration, buy a yacht for a couple of thousand or something else, although you have not visited this site before, then it is better to immediately delete the letter. It should also be noted that some scammers put a viral code on the "Unsubscribe" button.

New email box

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. Storage boxes are good for companies and other services, but for the average user they are completely useless.

You will still send it to friends in in electronic format by copying the address. But it will be much harder for spam bots to generate such a complex name.

Postal services

Judging by the numerous reviews of users from all over the world, the most interesting service in terms of spam filtering is Gmail. Local defense is set quite sensibly and is extremely rarely mistaken.

Anti-spam filters place all suspicious mail in the appropriate category, thereby freeing the inbox from unnecessary advertising junk. Of course, this tool is far from ideal, but still it works noticeably more efficiently than competing analogues.

It is also worth noting the domestic service - "Yandex-Mail". The local filters sort letters very efficiently, sifting the wheat from the chaff. But many advanced users complain about the domestic mailer for the abundance of advertising blocks. Yes, it cleans up the most diverse spam well, but the banner there and the banner here spoil the whole impression, and some even interfere with normal work.

In any case, if you have registered an e-mail on some third-party service, then in Gmail you can configure the interception of correspondence from any e-mail box that supports this function.

Spam is the distribution of letters of an advertising nature of a political or commercial nature to those people who did not subscribe to it. Spam refers to emails received on the user's email, phone, in social applications such as whats app, skype and many others. Main theme emails can be different: from visiting 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 spam took place in the nineteenth century. In 1864, British politicians received telegrams by telegraph advertising dental services. In the twentieth century, a similar term was used as a trademark of Hormel Foods Corporation. This was an abbreviation SPAM stands for SPiced hAM, which means "spicy ham" in translation. After the war, advertisements about the remaining unused canned food were broadcast at every step - from the radio, newsstands, on trams and buses. There was a sketch called "SPAM" on a television show in Britain. Hence the modern name.

Sometimes spam from harmless letters turns into a real black PR. For example, with its help, one company can denigrate another by sending Internet and phone users some messages that discredit the reputation of the latter. With the help of such mailings, pornography, drugs and much more is advertised, which is prohibited by law.

Disguised as spam extortion of money. For example, a woman receives a message in the mail that her son had an accident and asks to send money for a complex operation and a number where savings should be sent. Those women who have never experienced such actions believe and send money. And then it turns out that the son is healthy and nothing happened to him. More details about the types will be discussed below.

Types of spam

The most common type is advertising. With the help of advertising, companies sell services, offer goods. Such advertising is permitted at the legislative level. But many recipients are still wary.

Another type are Nigerian letters". The name was formed due to the fact that a large number of similar reports were received in Nigeria. The recipient of such a letter is promised a large amount of money, but it is necessary to arrange the opening of an account, shipping costs, which the fraudster allegedly will 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 confirm the data on the site, under which the link of the spammer site is hidden. Thus, the scammers will receive all the necessary data in order to transfer the money in the recipient's account to themselves.

happiness letters, common among schoolchildren and the adult population, in our country are also one of the varieties. They are based on the requirement to send a 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 a negative character. For example, to threaten punishment from heaven if a person does not forward a certain number of letters to friends.

All these legal and illegal actions are committed by people who are called spammers. They can be mailers, database collectors, software vendors, and even the average user. If a person wants to report something to many people without their request or consent, he automatically becomes a spammer.

This type of mailing brings benefits to customers of letters. Fighting this species is difficult, but possible.

How to deal with spam

You can deal with mailings yourself. If you often receive messages from a particular group or user, you can always add a person to black list and make sure that messages get into a specially designated block. On the site mail.ru, or Yandex.Mail, it is called "Spam".

For a user who wants to protect himself from spammers, Not recommended publish your mailing address on public websites. Or create a special box if you have to register in unreliable groups and communities. Not recommended reply to messages like this or follow the links in them. Perhaps a script is already hidden in the link that will block your computer or phone at best. At worst, it will get access to your cards and bank accounts.

There are special software that protects against annoying mailings. Typically, such anti-spam modules are built into the anti-virus or installed separately. Kaspersky Lab, Antispamus, Counterspam are the best of these programs.

In phones, it is recommended to blacklist such senders. Letters will be coming in separate block under the name "Antispam" in the phone. And the recipient, if he wants, can look, if not, he can put it on automatic deletion after a certain number of days.

You can find examples below in the pictures. Such are harmless mailings are also called spam on the Internet.

These are examples of mailings from ordinary users. There are entire companies, for example, computer repair, window installers, that do this kind of mailing, inserting links to their pages in usernames or in words. Below is an example:

What to do with spam emails

Why spam is dangerous

First of all, it is dangerous because in a pile of various mailing lists you will have to look for a really useful letter from a friend or worker for a long time. By opening a spam email and clicking on a link, you expose yourself and your corporate network to various viruses. Thirdly, the additional load on the network.