Spambots - The Enemy of Ethical Email Marketing
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.
