What is Spam?
Unwanted commercial email you did not authorize someone to send you.
Keep in mind the key word here is “commercial”.
Mailing someone you don’t know for the first time and asking them a question about their site, business or anything you saw their advertised business about is not spamming them as long as you don’t offer something for them to purchase in that email. Some people use this technique to slip in an offer.
The laws passed only a year ago have been significant in regards to spam. Any solicitation you get now must include the real name and physical address of that person, and a vehicle to remove your name from their list to be complaint to these new regulations.
If they are sending a one-time offer, it must explicitly state this. If your email address was collected by a site or business that sells email addresses it must state the name of the site or program that collected it and that you willingly opted in to receive it.
Many an ignorant home biz marketer, have the misconception that if your email address was collected and given to them legitimately from a list service that gives the marketer the right to put your address into an auto responder (AR). This is simply not true.
You gave the list service the right to accept email with offers, or information on these offers. You do not give anyone the right to put you into auto responders that send you many emails for the same thing from the same source. You have to be invited to the AR and give your consent for them to add you.
This is also done deceptively. Sites offer you free things, and in the process of joining to get these free things there are terms of service (TOS), long pages of text outlining what you agree to do or accept. Many have in this document stated you must accept mail from their AR. So if you get a lot of mail from one source daily this is most likely the case.
Read these TOS very well and understand what you are agreeing to do. If you lodge a spam complaint against a site and you have joined and agreed to get this mail, you will wind up being prosecuted not them. There are plenty who have done this out of ignorance or rage, and wound up on the hurting end of a bad situation all because they did not educate themselves properly.
The most insidious form of spamming comes from the practice of illegal email harvesting. Applications have been developed and are used by people with no morals or decency to human rights, and spam laws. The applications, or scripts, can be directed to search websites, classified ad sites, forums, and message boards for any email addresses it finds and it writes these addresses to a database in the form of a list.
These people then mail all in the list with their offer, illegally, using deceptive reply addresses. It’s a good assumption that if you get mail with none of the proper header and disclaimer info in the mail then someone using this method is spamming you.
They cleverly disguise their identity by using a non-existent email address. They use a mailing software that allows they to use this bogus address, and they use a proxy server to send it with so there is no way to trace the mail back them without legal injunctions against the proxy site.
Spammers go to great lengths to do this. Why do they go to all that trouble?
Because sending their spam to millions of names still gets buyers for what they are offering.
There are many people unaware of spam laws, and the methods behind the mail they are getting. When they see one such mail and it offers something they desire or need, they go on to purchase it not considering it was an untrustworthy person with no care whatsoever to that person who just clicked on the offer of that email. All that spammer wants is the money they can get.
You may be aware that spam has become so prolific many email box providers have incorporated automatic spam filtering to protect their members from unwanted spam mail. This personifies the level of the problem and how rampant spamming has become. The major network providers like Hotmail and Yahoo have fully functioning spam filters with various degrees of control you specify as a member.