Examples of Spam Attempts

Online Tools For Business

A Bit About Spam

Spam is the name given to junk email. It is also known as UCE, Unsolicited Commercial Email, which better describes what it is. Weve all received it: offers to buy the secret of a Get-Rich-Quick scheme, invitations for a free sample at a porno site, great deals on recycled toner cartridges, offers to refinance your mortgage, stock recommendations -- you name it, theres a spammer out there somewhere trying to put their email in your in-box.

It would be bad enough if it was just a matter of email users having to delete unwanted mail. Unfortunately, many spammers are not reputable operators with their own mail servers. Instead, they sign on with a regular commercial Internet Service Provider and fire off as many spams as they can before the ISP gets wise to what theyre doing and gives them the boot. Or they simply steal the services of any mail server they can find. Either of these methods can cause big trouble for the victimized ISP.

What happens is that any mail server that is known to be a source of spam is often blacklisted by operators of other servers. When this happens, then not even legitimate users of that server can get their mail delivered -- it is rejected as spam.

Many mail servers will accept a connection from, and send mail for, anyone at all. Spammers love this type server because they can steal the services -- send mail through it even though they are not paying customers and authorized users. This is called "relaying" since the server just passes on the spam from the spammer to the spammees, wherever they might be. Email sent in this fashion is traceable to the server used. The server is then likely to be blacklisted so that other servers will not accept mail from it, assuming that everything coming from the server is junk.

However, even if the server is not blacklisted, the legitimate users can be affected. If the server is busy delivering tens or hundreds of thousands of spam email messages, you may not be able to connect to send and receive your email. Other servers sending mail to your account -- mail you may depend on to conduct your business -- may not be able to connect either. Incoming mail intended for you may be delayed or even rejected and "bounced" back to the original sender.

So, even if you never receive any spam, you can still be seriously affected by spammers and their methods. Responsible mail server operators (and we like to think of ourselves as being in that category) therefore guard against server hijacking -- relaying of junk mail -- to protect their own reputations and their authorized users ability to send and receive email.

The protection mechanisms in place at OTFB stop a lot of spam. As mentioned, email servers can spend much of their time just rejecting spam. OTFB subscribes to several Blacklist services. They keep track of known spam sources by IP address and make that information known so that subscribers like OTFB can reject spam from these known spammers.

Here are some actual mail server log excerpts that demonstrate different types of spam attempts.

A Dictionary Attack: This spammer uses an automated script to try every name you can imagine, in the hope that someone at this domain has an account in that name.
Guess Her Email Address: They know her name and the domain name, but what's her email address? All they have to do is try every variation of her name in an attempt to get mail to her.
Persistence Doesn't Pay: This spammer tried to spam the same email address 1,938 times, all without success.

Spam is a huge problem and getting worse. Please don't encourage them by actually doing business with any spammer, or by purchasing any product or service offered by spammers. Oh, and don't try to unsubscribe your address from any spammer's "list". Offers to let you "opt-out" are usually just a method of collecting known, good email addresses. If you try to unsubscribe via links provided by a spammer, chances are very good that you will end up receiving more spam, not less.