History of the term
The term itself appeared in the 30s, when the famous American company Hornel Foods began to release new canned pork, giving them the sonorous name SPAM (SPiced hAM - spicy ham). The company conducted such a large-scale advertisement of its trademark that it was literally in public and in plain sight. Shop windows, newspapers, buses, building facades were full of information about this cheap, tasty, nutritious, economical product for the whole family. The company offered a wide variety of recipes for preparing dishes from this "miracle stew."
Over time, other firms began to use intrusive advertising, sending letters, scattering leaflets with ads on mailboxes. And with the development of high technology, sending bulk letters began to be carried out via the Internet and e-mail. And here the spam name stuck here, which means obsessive, unsolicited, insolent advertising.
Spam
Spam has many kinds. The most common option is letters to an e-mail box. They are sent by people or organizations to a large number of addresses and usually contain a commercial offer or advertisement. This type of advertising is widespread due to its cheapness. It is used to promote products that cannot be reported in any other way. For example, objects of pornographic content, counterfeit objects.
The so-called spam book is also quite common . This is when a certain place is created on the site - a guest book, where you can leave your comments, suggestions, suggestions for improving the resource. Many spammers are not shy and use this opportunity for their own purposes - to advertise the product, service, site promoted by them, as a result, a spam book is obtained. In order for annoying messages to be in one place, and not "walk" around the entire resource, annoying visitors, spam book is specially created on some sites.
Search engine spam is also used. And this is done like this: webmasters insert invisible text with popular words on their website. Surfers, making a request, get to such a site, but do not find what they want there. Many sites have pop-up consoles that distract and terribly interfere. There are also all kinds of letters of happiness, propaganda, mailing lists containing viruses.
From the foregoing, it is clear that spam is distributed through e-mail, dating sites, social networks, blogs, forums, message boards, spam books - also a tool for submitting unsolicited information.
Ways to Combat Spam
Most often, automated distribution of advertising messages is carried out using a computer program spam bot. This program itself searches for existing email addresses on various resources and sends unexpected correspondence to the addressee.
Therefore, you should try not to let spammers find out your personal email address. To do this, the following precautions should be taken:
- Do not publish or encrypt the email address;
- You can have a special box for provision in doubtful cases;
- You can change the address.
But these measures will cause inconvenience for you too. Therefore, it is better to use the advertising message filtering program - anti-spam bot. This program works for contacts not on your list and cuts off unnecessary spam mailings that are sent to a special folder. And even if the robot mistakenly marks the necessary document as spam, you can always return it and read it.
The best response to receiving spam will be its absence. Otherwise, any action on your part will make it clear to spammers that this email address is working, and mailings will only increase.