Spambots – The Enemy of Ethical Email Marketing
June 12th, 2009 by Dan
Any form of unsolicited email is called spam and there are those who are making fortunes in designing and marketing computer programs especially targeted to finding email addresses for use by spammers. Ethical email marketing doesn't want to spam people – but only sends emails to interested potential customers – the opposite of Spambots.
Spambots collect email address off the internet, off websites, news groups, special interest groups and even chat rooms. Because email addresses have a distinctive format, Spambots can often easily spot them. Processes are underway to outlaw them.
However, there are some clever people who are creating programs in order to foil Spambots; one such technique is known as address munging. Address munging deliberately modifies email addresses so that while humans can decode it, Spambots can’t.
However with the advent of these programs has come the evolution of sophisticated Spambots that are capable of recovering email addresses from character strings that appear to have been munged.
But the fight continues and methods to combat Spambots are still being created. Ethical email marketers are against Spambots because they give email marketing a bad name and send so much unsolicited mail that “real” emails can get tarred with the same brush.
Another attempt to foil Spambots is the email blocker or email filter, but they can at times prevent legitimate emails from reaching a subscriber who wants it. This can however be circumvented by the recipient who can generate their own list of specific email addresses the blocker should ignore. This is called a whitelist.
Forum Spambots troll the internet, looking for guestbook’s, blogs or forum where they can submit a spam link to the web forms it find there. The easiest way to foil these Spambots is to install a mail server on the host, thus enabling email activation.
Related posts:
- Harvesting e-mail addresses
Harvesting email addresses really appeals to spammers who can easily buy or trade lists of e-mail addresses from other spammers. Another common way to gain access to lists of e-mail addresses is via software known as ‘harvesting bots…’....
- Keeping Up With Address Changes
How many email addresses do you have? Don’t think about just your work and personal emails; your temporary accounts should be considered as well. Chances are that your tally will be more than one. If so, you’re just like almost…...
- Fixing Email Typos
Every email marketing… list has a number of addresses that bounce back emails due to typing errors. It’s a problem that everyone encounters. On the most part, all you can do is remove the email address from your online marketing...
- Will Your ISP Deliver?
Email marketing usually requires the sending of a large number of emails to different email addresses. Effective email marketing will also usually requires that you send emails to your list on a regular basis… and this further increases the number...
- Conducting Test Email Marketing Runs
Email marketing campaigns give you the unique opportunity of being able to conduct a test run… before you send out an entire email campaign. Few other forms of online marketing, or any type of marketing for that matter, allow this...
This entry was posted
on
Friday, June 12th, 2009 at
9:26 am . You can follow any responses to this entry through the
RSS feed.
Link to us
If you want to link to this blog, copy and paste the following HTML code to your website.
[...] Another common way to gain access to lists of e-mail addresses is via software known as ‘harvesting bots’. This software crawls web pages looking for e-mail addresses from public [...]