There is no shame in a spammer’s game
If you use the Internet and have an email address, then you are very familiar with what spam is. This unsolicited message is sent indiscriminately to various mails, individual emails, or other public groups. It is simply spam email. The kind of invasiveness these spam emails bring is equivalent to the kinds of spam that flood regular US mailboxes.
Almost everyone online is affected by it. All spammers really need is an email address or some kind of web address where receiving any kind of email is a primary target. Guestbooks, blog and article comment sections, web forums, and chat rooms are all susceptible to spam. Spam can include anything from advertising dating sites, knockoff bags, designer replica watches, pharmaceuticals, brides abroad, or just about anything that arouses the curiosity of unsuspecting recipients to lure them into the spammer’s trap.
By using spambots, a program that collects or harvests e-mail addresses from the Internet, spammers will seek out any type of audience where their unsolicited e-mails may exceed junk folders or spam. Spammers don’t care how much annoying or offensive their spam is. Their emails are even posted on funeral home guestbook records online for the obituaries of the recently deceased. Frankly, this kind of disrespect is extremely appalling to many members of the deceased’s family.
While spam is reportedly not against the law, it is certainly a major nuisance. Some available coding tools will protect your email address from robot harvesting, by coding it using JavaScript. Munging, a technique created to modify an email address so that it can be decoded by humans, but not a spambot, was once effective when used. Unfortunately, there are ways spammers are using cunning tactics to trick and circumvent these encryption tools.
Just as software programs are designed to help you easily and efficiently navigate and communicate online, there are people who create programs to steal and compromise the security of many email recipients, businesses, government agencies, and organizations. A deterrent to help reduce the amount of spam making its way through your inbox is activating your spam or quarantine folders and being careful about their activity while online. While this may not block all the spam that is sent to your email, it will certainly detect and filter much of that spam, email, and unsolicited that reaches your inbox.