Undesirable e-mail

Question:

Where does the junk mail I get come from?

More information:

We all get mail we don’t want. I don’t mean e-mail; I mean real mail (snail mail). I get ads for different things every day: restaurants I don’t eat at, charge cards I don’t sign up for, catalogs I don’t need, pizza I don’t order and bills I don’t want to pay. Sometimes I get cards, photos, notes, invitations and thank you notes (that’s the good stuff!). This doesn’t really sound much different than electronic mail. I can’t control what gets sent to me, I’ve certainly tried to get removed from some of the mailing lists (unsuccessfully).

E-mail is SO cheap to send sometimes it’s cheaper to mail it to everyone than to target it. Large corporations target their e-mail messages (they ask for your e-mail address, income, location, age, etc.); they don’t want the public complaining and picketing and such. Magazines sell advertisements based on the main readers by stating that 80% of our readers are 30-40 year old, professional and live in a metropolitan area and you should advertise with us (but they are still paying for the other 20% of the readers also). With targeted mail they can mail to just the people that fit their particular demographic (which really might be 30-35 years old) and pay a little bit more but get just the appropriate audience. Many companies you have never heard of (such as: Pat’s Mortgage company, Deluxe ink jet cartridges, or Chris’s adult content site) are just trying to spread the word mail as many e-mail addresses as they can find and hope that someone buys, with some of these companies with no storefront, no printed catalog it’s possible you won’t even get your product or you may get excellent service. Some of these sites are fine to shop from, but it’s hard to tell from a web page.

How do they get your address?

There are several ways:

  • You gave it to them! You gave your address when you signed up for a pay or free site or service. Have you bought anything at Border’s Books lately? They ask for your e-mail address almost every time you make a purchase. Sometimes even the reputable companies sell their mailing lists.
  • A friend of yours set it to them. Sometimes they get a discount when buying or signing up for something by giving a few friends e-mail addresses.
  • Those junk mails that you get the have pages of other peoples address before you get to the joke or rumor at the bottom are probably valid addresses. Eventually those messages could have the addresses pulled out of them and added to someone’s junk mail list.
  • They guess! They send mail to aaaaaa@southredford.net and aaaaab@southredford.net and so on (and all the obvious ones like smith@southredford.net). It doesn’t cost much so why not? Actually servers can be reprogrammed to notice attacks like that and refuse all mail from the sender’s server, the problem is if the sender is pat@aol.com (or a dozen other aliases) it’s bad to turn off aol.com, we may want some other people from aol.com to send us mail.
  • They have some little web ’bot (robot) or spider (a computer program) run around and click on every web page link it can find and whenever it finds an e-mail address it adds it to it’s database of addresses.

    Tricks:
    Sometimes there is a link at the bottom to remove you address from their list. If it’s a reputable site (Borders, Target, etc.) it will likely remove you. If it is a non-reputable site they may just mark you as a "good" address (you just verified it works and then you actually look at the messages) and send you more mail!

    * I don’t mean to say that the small companies on-line are "bad", just that larger companies that have been in business for years are generally less apt to target you for random e-mails or at least they are willing to remove you from their list.

    Last modified by Gary LaPointe at August 4, 2006 11:43 AM. (ID #TT000326)
    This entry was posted in the following categories: E-mail
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