What is Spam Email?

Spam emails are emails sent out in bulk, almost entirely to people who don’t want to receive them.

People send them in the hope of getting their message across or making a sale or getting someone to click on their video.  Whatever the reason – we don’t want these messages- they clog up our email systems and the Internet.

Sending out vast amounts of spam messages costs almost nothing, so people will continue to send them.

Estimates suggest there are around 28 – 30 billion spam email messages sent per day and that is around 60% of all email worldwide.

Who Makes the Spam Email?

Anybody wanting to get a message out to large numbers will consider sending bulk emails as they take very little effort and money. The biggest source of this spam in the world is the USA followed by Vietnam and India.

Advertising messages, emails from idiots, pointless emails, people trying get noticed and more make up spam.

What is Being Done to Stop Spam Email?

All of the email providers do their best to weed out spam messages and ensure they never get to their target. This means many billions of messages are killed off on send.

Microsoft alone reckon to block more than 2 billion spam messages per day and the other major email providers stop similar numbers of spam messages.

Why Can’t Spam Messages Be Completely Stopped?

It is a balance between allowing messages through or deleting them as the email providers don’t want to delete genuine emails and although you can often easily identify spam messages, there are many messages that could be spam or genuine.

It’s a similar game to trying to spot weeds in a garden. A weed is simply any unwanted plant in that location. A spam message is simply an unwanted message at that time by that recipient, so its hard for4 the email provider to be certain of which messages are spam.

Is Spam Successful?

The success rate of spam varies widely as some are professional messages and they get through spam filters to their target but most are hopelessly poor and are obvious. Overall the success rate is less than 1 in a 1000 messages and for many cases, less than 1 in 10,000 messages.

But many spammers need only tiny response rates to make money.

The Future of Spam

The spam senders are often idiots and their messages are identified as spam and deleted but many are sophisticated and know how to disguise their messages so that they get through the email providers spam filters.

There are automated services available that take an email message and break it up, send it from dozens of domain names and servers and add in spurious but non spam text in order to bypass spam filters.

It seems likely that the amount of spam messages will continue to grow and so will both the efforts to block it and the efforts of the spammers to get around those blocks.

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