See what "Spam" is in other dictionaries. What is spam? What is not spam

Spam is something that every web user is familiar with.

In the most common sense, spam is the mass mailing of promotional emails to users who have not given their consent.

Now spam has many more meanings and variations: SMS spam, social media spam, and so on. But let's start with the origin of the word itself.

Term

The very word "spam", or rather the English version of "spam" has a rather funny origin. SPAM is originally a trademark of an American company; under this brand in 1936, canned meat began to be produced, which during the Second World War was produced so much that it was necessary to urgently carry out an advertising campaign - it was necessary to sell them before the expiration date. These canned goods were advertised everywhere, advertising was also broadcast on the radio.

This situation was played up in one of the episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus, and the word SPAM acquired its current meaning in 1986, when many identical messages advertising a financial pyramid appeared.

Now the amount of spam varies from year to year. For example, in 2017, the share of spam in total email traffic was just over half, 56.63%; while the largest amount of spam (more than 13%) came from the United States.

Types of spam

Bulk mailing- the most famous type of spam. Spammers buy databases of email addresses and then send emails with commercial offers (which most often contain viruses, phishing, and so on).
Messages in social networks and instant messengers. Previously, these were the same advertising messages as in letters, but now a scheme is becoming popular when a user's account is hacked, and then messages are sent on his behalf with a request to transfer a certain amount of money.
Spam on forums. Spammers are also active on forums: they leave messages in discussions and send private messages to users. Sometimes this is used to build the link mass of a site.
Spam in website comments. The type of spam that website owners hate the most. The goal of spammers is still the same - either to advertise their products or services, or to increase thematic citation index(TIC).
Spam in directories and bulletin boards. Directories are used to promote sites (although less so now) and message boards are used for fraudulent ads.
Spam by SMS. As with mailing, spammers buy databases of users of mobile operators and send spam messages of an advertising or fraudulent nature.

Safe and dangerous spam

Spam messages can be divided into two large groups - safe and dangerous. The former are unpleasant, but threaten only with a spoiled mood and a waste of time, but the latter can harm the computer and finances.

Safe spam

Advertising legal goods or services. These are ordinary advertising letters, with the difference that users did not give their permission to receive them.
Advertising goods or services prohibited by law. If the law prohibits advertising a product or service, then spammers begin to actively use mailing lists, they have nothing to lose.
Compromising letters. May be related to politics; are sent with the aim of discrediting competitors, and can also be sent ostensibly on behalf of competitors in order to change their opinion for the worse.
"Letters of Happiness" Messages (including in messengers) with a request to forward the text to other users so that something good happens or something bad does not happen. Sometimes such letters are used by spammers to collect a database of addresses for subsequent mailings.

Dangerous spam

In general, spam is not a harmless thing, so any messages that look like spam should be treated very carefully.

How to deal with email spam

In order to minimize the amount of spam in your mail, you need to start by understanding whathow users get on mailing lists.

Carelessness when registering on the site. Often, in the registration form, there is already a checkmark right away - consent to receive promotional materials. However, it is not difficult to refuse spam in this case: at the end of each letter there should be an “Unsubscribe” link.
Breaking into. Fraudsters hack into users' websites and emails and gain access to databases (contacts).
Sale. Address bases, unfortunately, are sometimes sold by site employees themselves.
Phishing. The user enters their data on fake sites.

What to do?

The main advice, which has repeatedly shown its effectiveness:

register at least two email addresses. One for personal and work contacts, and the second for registration on commercial sites, sites with questionable content, and so on.

The next tip is to choose a reliable mail service (for example, gmail ). Spam filtering works well in such mail services, so most of the fraudulent emails will go straight to the Spam folder.

If some letter nevertheless "broke" into the main folder with letters, be sure to mark it as spam - all further letters from this user will go there.

You can also use filters and create rules to get rid of spam (for example, in Yandex mail).

Conclusion

Spam is a serious problem - mainly because of the dangerous links and files that can be inside the email, spam is a serious problem, especially for inexperienced users. Therefore, even if you are sure that you will never fall for the bait of scammers, be sure to tell your family and friends about the dangers.

Surely each of us, opening his mailbox, found there colorful leaflets containing information of an advertising nature. There you were offered to visit some resort, earn a million, be cured of the evil eye, etc.

And only a few, after reading these leaflets, found them useful for themselves. It is this distribution of information that is called unsolicited advertising, spam mailing, or simply spam.

The term "spam" refers mainly to emails. Quite often, almost all email that the recipients did not request is classified as spam. Recently, experts have studied all types of spam, as a result of which they concluded that when all unsolicited or promotional letters are massively classified as spam, there is a risk of losing business mail.

To better understand what spam is, consider

The main types of spam

Getting to some sites, you can’t help but pay attention on pop-up ads of a different nature. Such windows with advertising bring income to the author of the site. To increase income, sometimes several of these pop-up windows are installed on the site.

The next type of spam is the repeated distribution of messages in newsletters (the so-called " spam mailing"). Each such mailing is dedicated, as a rule, to a specific topic. The visitor subscribes to it in the hope of receiving the information of interest to him. According to the rules of such mailings, advertising messages are allowed, but with certain restrictions (for example, no more than once a week).

However, those involved in spamming are of little interest in these rules. They send their advertisements daily to several mailing lists at once. At the same time, spammers do not pay any attention to the topic. A similar situation with spam mailings can be found in chat rooms, forums and various bulletin boards.

Another type of spam filling guest books with advertisements. Some resources may contain guest books so that visitors can leave their messages (wishes, comments, suggestions, etc.) in them. However, spammers still manage to leave their mark here. They are not interested in the content of sites at all, they simply find links to guest books and place their advertisements there.

A common type of spam is spam comments on articles on websites and blogs. Such comments, as a rule, do not correspond to the topic of the article on the site, but always contain links to extraneous resources. Such links can be contained both in the text of the comment and in the name of the author of the comment.

A distinctive feature of such comments is that they are general in nature and therefore suitable for any site. For example, “this is an interesting article” or “the article is useful, but the algorithm is too complicated”, while a link to your spam page is necessarily attached.

Some webmasters, in order to attract visitors to their site, try to deceive search engines. They fill the pages of their resource with invisible text that contains the most popular words (free, download, etc.). Invisible text has the same color as the main background of the site, so the site visitor cannot see it. The user types in the search engine the phrase “download free music”, gets to a site of dubious content and, of course, does not find anything he wants.

However, the most common type of spam is the distribution of promotional information by e-mail. If your e-mail address is included in the "spam database", then "write - it's gone", because it is often not so easy to unsubscribe from such a mailing list, and sometimes it is simply impossible.

How to deal with spam?

How to unsubscribe from spam mailings? This is possible if there is a link at the end of the letter " cancel subscription", or "unsubscribe". By clicking on this link, you can remove your e-mail from the spam database. Unfortunately, such a link may be missing, so let's move on to the second option, how you can "break up" with spam mailings.

Comments on the site containing spam should be deleted manually by the site author or using a special plug-in.

It is better not to visit sites of dubious content with a bunch of pop-up windows at all in order to avoid the possibility of picking up viruses on your computer that any antivirus can miss ("and there is a hole in the old woman").

How to fight spam in Mail.ru mail?

Before we start fighting spam, I want to emphasize that some important and necessary emails end up in Spam by mistake. Therefore, sometimes it is useful to look into the Spam folder, especially if you are waiting for some kind of letter, but it is still not there.

You can explain to your mail server at mail.ru that such letters should be sent to spam.
Let's figure it out

What does it mean to mark as spam?

First you need to select the letter by checking the box next to it (number 1 in Fig. 1, click on the image to enlarge it):

Rice. 1 Mark an email as spam in Mail_ru

Now click on the "Spam" command (number 2 in Fig. 1). This command will only work on emails that have a checkmark next to them (i.e., selected emails). As a result, the letter will be moved to the Spam folder, and the mail.ru mail server will remember the sender as a spammer. This is how the manual “mark as spam” procedure works.

If you wish, you can delete the letter from the Spam folder by clicking on the "Clear" command (number 3 in Fig. 1), although after 30 days the letters from the Spam folder will be automatically deleted.

I want to note that the procedure for sending a letter to Spam may have to be repeated several times. For the mail server from the first (and even from the second) time may not realize that you want to teach it to send letters from this sender directly to Spam. No wonder they say that "repetition is the mother of learning", this rule also applies to mail servers.

How to fight spam in Yandex.ru mail?

Exactly the same procedure as described above for Mail.ru to mark an email as spam is suitable for a Yandex.ru mailbox.

Rice. 2 Mark the message as spam in Yandex.ru mail

To mark an email as Spam,

first check the box next to the letter (number 1 in Fig. 2),
click on the "This is spam" button (number 2 in Fig. 2),
click on the brush to clear the Spam folder (number 3 in Fig. 2). But this is not necessary, because after 30 days such letters are automatically deleted from the Spam folder.

Should I mark a mailing list as Spam if it used to be useful?

There are newsletters that you subscribed to yourself. For a while, such a newsletter was useful and interesting to you. Time has passed, the information from the mailing list has bored you, bothered you, is not interesting, etc. Should this mailing list be marked as Spam?

By marking the newsletter as Spam, you give a signal to the mail server (on Yandex, Mail.ru, etc.) to send letters from this author to Spam. Therefore, the mail server for ALL Internet users (and not just for you) will send letters from such an author to Spam.

This is NOT always fair to other Internet users who may need this information. In such cases, it will be fair and just to simply unsubscribe from such mailing without marking it as Spam.
What can be concluded from the above?

Spam is information that we did not request, did not subscribe to it, it is imposed on us.

Nevertheless, do not forget that "the forest is cut - the chips fly." Therefore, it is sometimes necessary to look into the Spam folder, because important letters may accidentally appear there.

We are fighting the rest of spam to the best of our ability. It is often better to unsubscribe from a mailing list that has become outdated than to mark it as spam.

Spam is anonymous, unsolicited bulk e-mails, i.e. the electronic equivalent of the paper-based promotional mail that clutters regular mailboxes. Spam is most often used to advertise goods and services. Spammers send out a large number of advertising messages and profit from those who respond to them. In addition, attackers use spam to carry out phishing attacks and spread malware.

Over the past ten years, the scope of spam has expanded, and the volume of delivery has grown significantly. At first, spam was sent directly to individual user addresses, and it was easy to block it. Over time, high-speed Internet channels appeared, which gave a quick and cheap opportunity to send spam messages in bulk. Spammers also discovered that they could use individual users' modems for their own purposes - the modems were not equipped with tamper-proofing and could be used by attackers from anywhere in the world. In other words, unsuspecting users' modems were sending out huge amounts of spam.

This continued until hardware manufacturers learned how to equip their equipment with anti-spam tools and spam filters became more effective. However, spam has also evolved: not only the methods of distribution have improved, but also techniques that help attackers bypass spam filters. The confrontation between spammers and those who protect Internet channels from complete clogging continues.

What's happenedspam- fight againstspam

In order to effectively fight spam, it is necessary to clearly define what exactly is meant by the word “spam”.
Often, providers and network owners prefer to be guided by the "presumption of guilt", referring to spam almost all mail that was not requested by the recipient. Over the past year and a half, experts have studied all existing types and categories of spam and have come to the conclusion that if any unsolicited or promotional email is indiscriminately classified as spam, there is a great danger of losing business mail.

The vast majority of SPAM is used for advertising. Usually some product or service is advertised, sometimes for winding up counters on the site, less often for sending viruses or trojans
But there is a common goal - to bring your information to the maximum possible number of recipients at minimal cost. Moreover, the "authors" do not care about the composition of the audience, the main thing is the number

Collection of information. Under the guise of a survey or order, they offer to fill out a questionnaire and send your data to the specified address.

Sending Trojans. The Trojan collects the necessary information from your computer (passwords, provider phone numbers, etc.) and sends it back.

If you receive an email with commercial advertising that you didn't ask for, try to determine who the spammer's provider is and file a complaint with the appropriate technical addresses or contact your ISP for help.
If the spammer's complaints to the provider do not give the desired result, and he continues his activities, usually the providers are ready to go even for a complete ban on receiving mail from the provider's mail server, which encourages the actions of their negligent users.

Something about spam

It is quite obvious that each of the network users sooner or later faces such disgrace as spam.

One has only to highlight your e-mail address in a forum, guestbook, or any other "public resource", a stream of "garbage" will pour into the specified e-mail. Trash in electronic form will not particularly indulge in variety. Spamming is the unsanctioned sending of messages, mainly of an advertising nature. Why is it so annoying to users?

Spam downloads your mailbox, in addition to your desire, it eats up network traffic - simply your money, it takes your time to sort messages and clean up the mailbox. For example, I have not received mail using the "check mailbox" method for a long time, I use only the message manager, deleting most of the messages on the server. But even looking at headlines takes time, and time is money. For these reasons, spam will still be spam, even if your unauthorized message contains words like: "Your address was taken from public sources." You pay for every message that comes to you, and spammers simply steal your money, no matter what arguments they give in their defense.

Let's consider these arguments using the example of DEMETRIUS Software, notorious for its Mail Grabber software. Naive referrals promising a thousand bucks for free, inexperienced spammers attaching 300-500 kilos worth of Word files to messages - stupidity is obvious here, and Demetrius continues to contribute to this. What does a company that makes money from sending spam and selling software for it offer?

Now the text content of letters is no longer in vogue, we recommend using the HTML type. In addition to pictures, you can insert a table with your price list into the text, etc.

Not only is the HTML type of a letter three times larger than plain text, but they also strive to send a picture. By the way, more than half of Russian-speaking Internet users use The Bat! mail program, as the most protected from viruses. And in this program, only a very interested user will look at the HTML type of the letter. Spam is such unprofessional advertising work that it is difficult to expect masterpieces from the originator of such a message. Illiterate work sometimes leads to such clumsy HTML...

There is a certain circle of people (about 0.1% of the total number of users) who react inadequately (I would say hysterically) to such letters.

Don't you think Demetrius is just lying here? So far I haven't met a person who likes spam. Let's assume that the user has on-line unlimited. But how to evaluate the time spent? How much does an hour of work of a qualified specialist cost? And one minute of a top manager? I suspect that the instant shutdown when spam is suspected is due to the fact that the spammers have also already got the heads of provider companies.

To date, email marketing is one of the most effective ways of advertising exposure. Therefore, despite the negative attitude of some part of the Internet community, this method has been used, is being used, and will be used ...

Do you often receive unwanted advertising messages in your email, but you do not pay much attention to them? This article is dedicated to explaining what spam is and why it should be combated.

And so, first of all, let's answer the question, what is spam?- If in fact, then Spam is advertising messages received that you did not consent to.. Spam is a daily occurrence these days. Many do not even think about the fact that spam is not so harmless.

Spam emails can carry a certain virus, which can harm your computer, and spam creates a lot of traffic, which seriously loads the network. Most often, they send out unnecessary advertising to anyone, for example, selling windows, training courses, diet pills, making money on the Internet, etc. Addresses for such mailings are collected automatically, without the consent of the mailbox owner, so when you leave your email in an open source, it is better to do it in encrypted form, for example, mymail(dog)mail.ru. True, this method also does not give a 100% guarantee that your address will not fall into the spam mailing lists. How to increase the deliverability of your emails? Read more.

Recently there has been an active fight against spam. Why is this being done?

Firstly, no one wants to receive unnecessary letters in their mail and permanently delete them. Secondly, many of these mailings are carried out with the aim of infecting your computer with a virus or obtaining some of your confidential data for further action. Thirdly, spam takes a lot of valuable time, for example, in employees of large firms, and this only leads to a loss.

Can spam be avoided?

As mentioned above, you can encrypt your email addresses in open sources. If you are receiving unwanted emails in your inbox, you can use a spam filter. This program is included in email clients and recognizes spam emails by certain criteria. The program analyzes the content of the received email and compares it with the email containing outright spam. The second way is analysis of the IP address from which spam has already been received. True, this method is not particularly effective, since spammers are constantly changing servers to send such emails. In the case when the option of placing a mail domain on a hosting and using your own domain for mailboxes is considered, then you can consider another option with placing protection on the hosting server itself. Many hosters use so-called spam filters on their servers (for example, we use spam-assassin). When properly configured, they are generally quite effective. There are many more ways to detect spam automatically and manually (analysis of the header, rejection of letters from a non-existent domain, determination of mass mailings), but not one of them yet provides 100% protection against unwanted correspondence.

How to make a newsletter so that it does not fall into spam?

The recipients of the emails must be your subscribers or give explicit consent to receive the correspondence. The fewer complaints you receive, the less likely you are to be put on the spam list.
Your letter must have the function “describe from the mailing list” (automatically or manually).
At the beginning of the letter, you need to indicate the name or nickname of the user you are addressing.
Newsletter must be done from the same email addresses and IP addresses.
Indicate the reason why the user received this email (…because you are subscribed to our news, etc.).
Be sure to use the so-called or PTR record for the IP address of the server from which the mailing is done.
Regularly check the presence of the IP address of the server from which you are sending out in spam databases (spamhouse, spamcop, etc.). If the address falls into such databases, it needs to be “extracted” from there and it is imperative to solve the problem due to which the IP was entered there.
If you are using a regular virtual address for your account/website from which you send out mailings to subscribers, it is best to additionally purchase a dedicated IP address.

If your mail or IP is blacklisted by anti-spam, your emails will not be delivered to the recipient and this will negatively affect the reputation of your domain and IP address. Also, do not advertise your site with spam emails. Programs analyze the letter, see a link to your site and mark it as a resource that is advertised using spam. And in the future, all your letters will be defined as spam. Is your IP blacklisted? .

Where did the word "spam" come from?

But in the end, a few facts from history. There is a version that after the Second World War there were huge stocks of canned Hormel Foods, which was intended for soldiers. To sell not very fresh products, the company ran an advertising campaign. The word SPAM (SPiced hAM - spicy ham) was absolutely everywhere, it was in all the newspapers, it was broadcast on the radio. It was impossible to hide from this word. This action caused only dissatisfaction, since no one was in a hurry to buy canned food.

If you have any questions or additions to this article, please leave a comment. The company is open for communication!

The modern look of the bank

The word "SPAM" originally appeared in the city. It stood for SPiced hAM (spicy ham) and was a trademark for Hormel Foods canned meat - spicy minced pork sausage. The term SPAM gained worldwide fame as applied to annoying advertising thanks to the famous sketch of the same name from the famous show Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969) by the comedian group Monty Python. The point of the sketch is that in one cafe, all dishes on the menu contain "SPAM", some even several times. When the main character of the sketch, who came to this cafe with his wife, asks to bring him a dish without "SPAM", the waitress offers him a dish with "a little SPAM". The visitor is indignant, and the Viking choir, sitting at neighboring tables, begins to sing the song of praise to "SPAM", after which the sketch plunges into chaos. At the end of the sketch, the hero's wife exclaims: I don't like SPAM! (English) "I don't like spam!"). In the credits, the word "SPAM" was also added to the names of the actors. In total, this word is mentioned in the sketch more than a hundred times.

The most common types of spam

Advertising

Some legitimate businesses advertise their products or services through spam. They can carry out its distribution on their own, but more often they order it from those companies (or individuals) that specialize in this. The attractiveness of such advertising lies in its relatively low cost and (presumably) large reach of potential customers. Such unsolicited advertising can backfire, causing rejection in recipients, and can even become synonymous with intrusive advertising, as happened with ham, they can actually increase sales without giving recipients much trouble. The main terms of mutual benefit for the recipient and the organizer of the mailing list are:

combining the roles of the mailing list organizer and the provider of e-mail services;
improving the quality of the target audience of each specific promotional mailing;
warning customers by the provider that he will send promotional emails;
providing convenient means to block unwanted emails.

Advertising of illegal products

Spam often advertises products that cannot be reported in other ways - for example, pornography, counterfeit (fake) goods, drugs with circulation restrictions, illegally obtained classified information (databases), counterfeit software.

Anti-advertising

"Nigerian Letters"

Sometimes spam is used to extort money from the recipient of the email. The most common method was called "Nigerian letters" because a large number of such letters came from Nigeria. Such a letter contains a message that the recipient of the letter can somehow receive a large amount of money, and the sender can help him with this. Then the sender of the letter asks to transfer some money to him under the pretext of, for example, paperwork or opening an account. Defrauding this amount is the goal of scammers.

A narrower name for this type of fraud is scam or scam 419(according to the article number in the Criminal Code of Nigeria).

Phishing

Distribution methods

Spam folder in the mail client window

Email

The largest flow of spam is distributed via e-mail (e-mail). Currently, the share of viruses and spam in the total e-mail traffic is, according to various estimates, from 70 to 95 percent. In spam, advertising of unpopular goods is most common: viagra, etc. .

Fight against spam

Ideology

Obviously, spam brings economic benefits to its customers. This means that users, despite their dislike of spam, still use the services advertised through spam. As long as the return on spam outweighs the cost of overcoming protection, spam will not disappear. Thus, the most reliable way to fight is to refuse services advertised through spam. There are proposals to use social stigma, up to and including termination of communication, against individuals who buy spam-advertised goods and services.

Other methods are aimed at making it difficult for spammers to access users.

Preventive protection measures

The most reliable way to fight spam is to prevent spammers from knowing your email address. This is a difficult task, but some precautions can be taken.

All methods of hiding an address have a fundamental drawback: they create inconvenience not only for alleged spammers, but also for real recipients. In addition, it is often necessary to publish the address - for example, if it is the contact address of the company.

Filtration

Because promotional emails tend to be very different from regular mail, a common method of dealing with them has become to weed them out of the incoming mail stream. At present, this method is the main and most widely used.

Automatic filtering

There is software (software) for automatic detection of spam (so-called spam filters). It may be intended for end users or for use on servers. This software uses two main approaches.

The first is that the content of the letter is analyzed and a conclusion is made whether it is spam or not. A letter classified as spam is separated from other correspondence: it can be marked, moved to another folder, deleted. Such software can run both on the server and on the client's computer. In the latter case, the user does not see the filtered spam, but continues to incur the costs associated with receiving it, since the filtering software receives each letter and only then decides whether to show it or not. On the other hand, if the software is running on a server, the user does not bear the cost of transferring it to his computer.

The second approach is to use various methods to identify the sender as a spammer without looking at the text of the letter. This software can only work on a server that directly receives emails. With this approach, additional traffic is spent only by the server for communicating with spammer mail programs (that is, for refusing to accept letters) and accessing other servers (if any) during the check.

There are also specialized online services, for example, Kaspersky Lab (Kaspersky Hosted Security service), Outcom (SPAMOREZ), INKAP (Antispam-Post), which provide paid spam protection. Changing the MX record in the company's domain name (see

Another problem with automatic filtering is that it can mistakenly mark useful messages as spam. Therefore, many mail services and programs, at the request of the user, may not delete those messages that the filter considers spam, but place them in a separate folder.

Automatic filtering methods

Automatic filtering programs use a statistical analysis of the content of an email to decide if it is spam. The greatest success has been achieved with algorithms based on Bayes' theorem. For these methods to work, preliminary "training" of filters is required by passing manually sorted letters to it in order to identify statistical features of normal letters and spam.

The method works very well when sorting text messages (including the selection can cut off up to 95-97% of spam. To bypass such filters, spammers sometimes put the content in the picture attached to the letter, while the text is either missing or random, which is not allows the filter to compile statistics for recognizing such messages.In this case, you must use text recognition programs (most modern email programs do not support this), or use other methods.

The key to the reliable operation of the Bayesian method is the constant additional training of the filter and an indication to it of the mistakes it makes. In mail programs, for this, the possibility of manually marking a message as “spam / non-spam” is introduced, and in mail services on the Internet, a “report spam” button is introduced.

Optional filtering

Many programs and mail services on the Internet allow the user to set their own filters. Such filters may consist of words or, more rarely, regular expressions, depending on the presence or absence of which the message goes or does not go to the dustbin. However, such filtering is time consuming and inflexible, and it also requires the user to have a certain degree of familiarity with computers. On the other hand, it allows you to effectively filter out some of the spam, and the user knows exactly which messages will be filtered out and why.

Blacklists

Ownership, use, effectiveness

These include:

lists of IP addresses of computers known to send spam.
(widely used) lists of computers that can be used for mailing - "open relays" and "open proxies", as well as - lists of "dialups" - client addresses that cannot have mail servers
(possible use) a local list, or a list maintained by someone else.
(widespread due to ease of implementation) blacklists that are queried through the DNSBL service ( DNS B lack L ist). Currently, this method is not very efficient. Spammers find new computers for their purposes faster than they can be blacklisted. In addition, multiple computers sending spam can compromise an entire mail domain or subnet, and thousands of legitimate users will be unable to send mail to servers using such a blacklist indefinitely.
(there are) lists of those who preach rather radical theories (for example, equating viral messages with malicious spam, etc.).

Misuse

Often irresponsible and incorrect use of blacklists by resource administrators, leading to the blocking of a large number of innocent users.

Example: use of lists without exact representations of what addresses are included in it and how, use of mail blacklists for web resources, etc.

Irresponsible use

Example: failure to provide the user (or administrator) of a blocked address with information about the list (since there are a great many of them) or to guide their actions by the principle of the presumption of guilt.

Racketeering by blacklist administrators

Recently, there have been more and more complaints on the net about blacklist administrators who blackmail ISPs and hosting providers by refusing to remove IP addresses from which spam was once possibly sent (addresses are blacklisted by anonymous complaints, which are often impossible to verify) . In addition, many require "donations" from the owners of IP addresses for the removal of entries from the black lists.

Mail server authorization

Various methods have been proposed to confirm that the computer sending the letter is indeed eligible (Sender ID , SPF , Caller ID , Yahoo DomainKeys, MessageLevel ), but they have not yet become widespread. In addition, these technologies limit some common types of mail server functionality: it becomes impossible to automatically forward correspondence from one mail server to another (

A common policy among ISPs is that clients are only allowed to establish SMTP connections with the ISP's servers. In this case, it becomes impossible to use some of the authorization mechanisms.