SPAM is the ultimate form of shotgun marketing.  Most SPAM marketers expect fewer than 1 in 5000 e-mail recipients to ever follow one of their links (and less still to actually buy the product advertised on the other side).  In order to support such an inaccurate form of marketing, spammers need to build up huge pools of e-mail addresses at very little cost.

That’s where e-mail spam-bots come in.  According to Wikipedia:
E-mail spambots harvest e-mail addresses from the Internet in order to build mailing lists for sending unsolicited e-mail, also known as spam. Such spambots are web crawlers that can gather …

This week I conclude my series on e-mail deliverability inspired by the Lyris Inc panel featuring Michael Kelly of Click Mail Marketing, Craig Spiezie of the Online Trust Alliance, and David Fowler of Lyris Technologies.  If you enjoyed this series, or found it useful, please comment on this post.

Origins of the term SPAM

Anyone telling you that SPAM is an acronym (at least in regards to its online usage) is pulling your leg.  It comes from Monty Python’s SPAM skit, where SPAM manages …

If your website has an unprotected contact form, sign-up form or guestbook, you are asking for trouble. Websites large and small, old and new, popular and rarely visited—all are at risk. You need to protect the data your clients provide!

What is the problem?
Internet robots (aka “bots”) find web forms and maliciously interfere with them. Bots can send thousands of spam emails through otherwise respectable web forms. Bots can also fill in the forms, signing up for e-mails, and even ordering the services and products you offer. Some bots use virus-laden attachments to get into forms to steal users’ passwords and …