Spam Mail

by

Volkan GEZER

Prof. Dr. Hasan Hüseyin Erkaya

Technical Writing

29 May 2009
 Gezer ii

Outline

Thesis: Although spam mails have always become a big problem in our virtual lives to

advertise since 1978, we found some solutions for it.

1. What is spam?

2. Spam mail types

2. 1. Text

2. 2. Image/pdf

3. How to identify spam?

4. Spamming

4. 1. Why do they spam?

4. 2. How do they spam?

4. 3. Who does spam most?

5. Problems of spam mail

5. 1. What causes to receivers?

5. 2. What causes to senders?

5. 3. What causes to internet?

6. Solutions of spam mail

6. 1. Avoiding receiving spam mail

6. 1. 1. Hide address

6. 1. 2. Do not reply

6. 1. 3. Secondary e-mail

6. 1. 4. Do not trust everyone

6. 2. Avoiding being a spammer

6. 3. Preventing mails to go spam

6. 3. 1. Disable spam filter

 Gezer iii

6. 3. 2. Add to contacts

6. 3. 3. Mark as no spam
 Gezer 1

Spam Mail

Spam mail is the biggest problem of communication on the internet although there are

some solutions for it. The first spam mail was sent on 3 May, 1978 to ARPANET users and

had not been liked since this day because of this mail. Like the same as today, the sender had

taken lots of complaint mails from receivers. Despite the complaint mails, the same sender

DEC (a marketing representative) had sent the second and the third spam mail. Although

spam mails have always become a big problem in our virtual lives to advertise since 1978, we

found some solutions for it.

According to Alan Schwartz & Simson Garfinkel, spam is an unsolicited, unwanted

message sent to you without your permission. The same source says, “Spam is the Internet’s

version of junk mail, telemarketing calls during dinner, crank phone calls and leaflets posted

around town, all rolled up into a single annoying electronic bundle.”

Spam mail has two types that can go to receivers’ mailbox: Text and graphic. Text

spams are just mails which seem came from your friend or a company. Mike Grunch

describes the graphic spam as, “… messages containing only a picture or those both a picture

and some text.” Grunch says, PDF (which is a format usually used for e-books) files which

are started being sent are called image spam, too. Schwartz & Garfinkel classifies the kinds

of unwanted messages as:

Unsolicited commercial email (UCE), advertisement messages which are sent

to you without your wish for the product.

Unsolicited bulk email (UBE), messages are sent to thousands of users for

political or harassment purposes.

Make money fast (MMF), messages that want you to forward the email to your

friends or to another person, to add your address or to add ten emails to get money.
 Gezer 2

Reputation attacks seem from a company, organization or a well-known people

although sent from a spammer.

Identifying the spam mail seems easy, but it is not. Generally, a spam mail has some common

words inside like: cheap pills or cheap site ranking etc. and sometimes looks it came from a

strange mail address we do not know like sam123_xyz@abc.com. Here is a spam mail

example taken from Schwartz & Garfinkel:

Received: (from mail@localhost)

by apache.vineyard.net (8.8.5/8.8.5) id LAA01663

for <simsong@vineyard.net>; Sat, 16 May 1998 11:57:57 -0400 (EDT)

From: charles7713@yahoo.com

Message-Id: <199805161557.LAA01663@apache.vineyard.net>

Received: from 209-142-2-72.stk.inreach.net(209.142.2.72)

by apache.vineyard.net via smap/slg (V1.3)

id sma001626; Sat May 16 11:57:27 1998

Date: Sat, 16 May 1998 05:18:34

To: <simsong@vineyard.net>

Subject: Search Engines, 400 for 5.75 (1)

*** LIMITED TIME SPECIAL OFFER ***

For Only $5.75 (1) We Will Submit Your

Web Site To Over 400 Of The Net's Hottest

Search Engines, Directories & Indexes.

If you're site isn't listed in the Search

 Gezer 3

Engines, how can people find you to buy your

products or services?

* Your Competition Is Getting Noticed -

Are You? Get Noticed By Your Prospects.

Visit Our Web Site To Learn More:

http://www. tiffiny. com/sitesubmissions

Thank You

(1)

The price for this service is $69 prepaid which

covers the cost of submitting your site every

three months for an entire year. We have shown

the price of $5. 75 to show you how inexpensive

this program really is when the overall cost is

annualized. Minimum 12 month term and full

prepayment required.

======================================

Name removal requests.

Send to:

TO: webmaster@tiffiny.com

SUB: remove
 Gezer 4

======================================

To see this message as above, we have to look at the source code of the message. To

understand whether this mail is a spam, we have to examine the lines. It says it has been

received from charles7713@yahoo.com. We do not know who this person is, but it can be a

real person, we cannot be sure. The subject “Search Engines, 400 for 5.75” makes us sure

about this mail is a spam. According to Schwartz & Garfinkel, this message advertises

illogically because subject says only for 5.75, but the body says $5.75 per month with

minimum a year term. They also say that there are not 400 “hot” search engines and the mails

sent to webmaster will be ignored, or will allow them to understand this mail is in use, but

will not keep their promise to delete you.

Spammers spam because of some good reasons. According to Schwartz & Garfinkel,

an advertisement cost in a newspaper starts from $24 to $2500 according to qualifications.

The same source indicates that, sending product catalogs are more expensive (from $50000 to

$150000) depending the number of receivers and size. Comparing the speed and prices, spam

mail is the cheapest way to spread your product because mails can be bought from some

websites and companies for a low price.

Schwartz & Garfinkel explains that spammers use merge/purge technique while

sending to prevent duplicates, or add some interesting subjects such as “Re: To selected

clients” not to have been deleted without reading by you According to the same source, they

can make the mail is from yourself like “From: yourmail@hotmail.com, To:

yourmail@hotmail.com.” Grunch says, cleverer spammers use multi layer pictures, frames

and animations to trick anti-spam programs. Spammers collect mails from mail lists, results

of search engines (by typing @domain.com), and your website using robots or chain mails

(sent mails that you type your friends’ list and forward them to help poor people, prevent
 Gezer 5

child porn etc). In chain mails, spammer often adds his/her address to receive list of “to”

addresses.

Spam mail statistics traced by Marshal shows us, Brazil is the top country who

spammed most and United States is the second. Turkey is at the third place in top spammers’

table. The same source shows us that the most popular subject of spam mails are related to

health (71%) and product advertisements (21%).

Spam mail causes lots of problems. They can waste time of receivers. Also, if users

use a webmail spam filter and try to receive mails via POP3 (Post Office Protocol), they will

probably not reach to their messages in case a message that is not spam, but filtered

accidentally as spam. Normal mail senders encounter a big problem with spam because after

a certain number of messages sent in a day by spammers his/her mail address will be added to

blacklist. This means the messages will not be relayed if your address in this list. You cannot

be sure if your message has been delivered if you do not contact the person via other ways. If

you have your own server, you can be sure that your message is not delivered by looking at

your server log. Here is a sender who has been blocked by spam filter of Gmail (from my

mail server log):

 Gezer 6

Picture shows us; from address is a common address which can widely be used as a

spammer. The responses are to inform our mail will not be accepted. The last line says, our

retries have exceeded, delete mails.

If you are a postmaster (who has privileges to add, delete users or to moderate the mail

list), all mails could not delivered to receiver or sender back will be sent to you.

Spam mail will cause bigger problems for internet because the traffic will be slower

while sending a thousand messages simultaneously or without a pause. The mail server

which holds all sent or received mails can be unable to connect to internet because of the high

traffic use, so all mails sent to this server may not be delivered. If sender does not try again,

recipient will not be aware of the mail.

Although those problems generate a big effect on us, we have lots of solutions for

spam mail. First solutions are for avoiding receiving spam mails. First, we can hide our mail

address in our websites not to show spambots. Gregory Orlov suggests us that hiding mail

can be done by erasing all mail address, or adding a text to make sure it does not seem a real

email address. For example, writing mymail(deletethiswhilesendinmeemail)@mydomain.com

in your website, or using mymail at mydomain.com as usual will be enough to deceive

spambots. If you want to be reached by users you can use contact forms instead. Indiana

University explains that, to prevent receiving spam mails, do not reply spam or chain mails.

Spam mails often say “please click here not to receive further mails” whereas this means, “I

always read all mails; add me to your frequent list.” The same source adds that, using a

secondary email can help you to reduce spam mails. If you open a new email account from a

provider who has spam mail filter, you can forward the mails to your real account. In this

way, you can write the new spam-enabled mail address. In addition, if your mail also has

spam filter, you can increase the protection level for spam mails. Another way to avoid spam
 Gezer 7

is not to trust everyone. If you do not have to write your address, don’t write. If you have to,

create a free email account to use only for these purposes.

If you do not want to be a spammer and not to be in blacklist, you must secure your

mail’s passwords. You can create safe passwords by using both numbers and special

characters, or not using common words like your date of birth, your last name etc. For

example, instead using password as your password; you can use p@55w0rd. Second way is

to change your passwords within periods. For example, if you change your passwords every

month, you have a little chance to have your passwords stolen. Second way not to be a

spammer is that to forward mails by typing them into BCC address. BCC (blind carbon copy)

helps to hide all mail addresses you sent except the receivers. Receivers only sees that the

mail sent to him/her.

Avoiding mails to go spam is important if you’re using a mail client to read your mails

because spam folder is not accessible via this client. You can reach your spam mails in many

ways. For example, you can disable your spam filter, if you can. If you don’t have an option

to disable your filter you can make a trick to do this. For example, in Gmail you can create a

filter from your settings and add the text “in:spam” to the field “containing words” then

choosing the action “do not send to spam” to make all messages go to inbox. If you have

your own private mail, you can contact your providers to help you.

Spam filters often look at your contact list firstly. If the person in your contact list, it

is not sent to spam folder. So, you can add your friends and customers to your contact list to

prevent their mails to go spam. Also, you can mark messages as “not a spam”, to avoid

marking them as spam.

Last two solutions do not enable different kind of messages to go your inbox, so if you

do not check your account via webmail interface, you will not see different mails. Nils

Neugrewe says that most providers like Gmail do not keep spam mails longer than 30 days
 Gezer 8

and you can accidentally lose your mails. Schwartz & Garfinkel tell us that spammers say,

erase the mail if you don’t want, but Nathan Kuhlman says that if you are a person who takes

hundreds of mails everyday like a journalist, you must check all your mails including spams

to make sure you did not miss anything.

In brief, spam mails are waste of time and need smart solutions such as filtering and

anti-spam software to prevent receiving them. Accidentally marked messages must be

prevented to enable users read the email. As the time passes, the number of spam will

increase and we have to be aware of the dangers of the spam. Behave knowing spammers are

clever and not being deceived by chain mails.

 Gezer 9

Works Cited

Grunch, Mike, “Graphic spam: how to avoid spam filters using images”

http://www.articles-about-spam.com/graphic-spam.shtml, accessed on 19.03.2009

Indiana University, “What can I do to avoid receiving spam email?”

http://kb.iu.edu/data/abdh.html, updated on December 11, 2004.

Kuhlman, Nathan Ashby, “Does spam cause journalists to miss real e-mail?”

http://www.ashbykuhlman.net/blog/2003/10/, accessed on October 31,2003

Marshal, “Spam Statistics”,

http://www.marshal8e6.com/trace/spam_statistics.asp, accessed on 23.05.2009

Neugrewe, Nils, “Gmail: The Problem With Spam Mails”,

http://netzreport.googlepages.com/gmail_the_problem_with_spam_mails.html,

accessed on 18.03.2009

Orlov, Gregory, “Prevention is better than Cure”,

http://www.articles-about-spam.com/prevention-is-better-than-cure.shtm, accessed on

19.03.2009

Schwartz, Alan and Simson Garfinkel, “Stopping Spam” O’Reilly 1st edition, 1998.