The fight against Spam and Spambot is something that we must take seriously. The reason is that it will generate a waste of time, both for us and for the company in which we are working. You also have to take it seriously because it sometimes causes psychological problems such as stress.
What is spam and strategies to avoid it
The spam we can define it as that unsolicited mail, junk mail or spam that we receive in our inbox. These are generally advertising-type e-mails sent massively and whose sender we do not know. This term was popularized, thanks to a 1970 skit by the British comedy group Monty Python in their television series Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Then later the concept began to be applied to spam in the 90s. As we have already mentioned before, it can be a serious problem that must be minimized.
It should also be added that it can become a security-related problem. Sometimes they are not always mere advertisements. For example, sometimes Phishing attacks are camouflaged in Spam. Therefore, you have to be very careful with URLs and attachments that contain these types of messages.
On the other hand, we must adopt a series of strategies to protect ourselves from Spam. One of them may be to create an alternative email address to request information about certain products or questions about which we have doubts. Another option that we can also use and that does not require registration is temporary emails. The only thing you have to be careful about is that they have a certain expiration date. Now we go with the other protagonist, the Spambot.
What is Spambot and differences with Spam
The spambot is a computer program designed to help in sending spam. Their way of working is that thanks to these bots or spam robots they are able to create accounts and send spam messages with them. These programs can fill in forms automatically and try to pass themselves off as human beings in order to spread their messages to as many sites as possible.
There is also another type of email spambot that collects email addresses from material posted on the Internet. Mailing lists are then created to send spam emails. These types of bots are web crawlers that can harvest email addresses from websites, newsgroups, chat room conversations, and more.
The difference between Spam and Spambot is that the first requires human action while in the second the one that performs the actions is a computer program. In this regard, to protect themselves from spam bots, computer scientists invented CAPTCHA. We could say that the latter is a kind of test designed to prevent robots from publishing their messages. However, while not perfect, they can help eliminate a lot of spam.
Also another practice that mobile phone users suffer from is a high number of robocalls due to automated phone spam. Fortunately, there are some apps that warn you before picking up if it’s spam. Lastly, as you may have noticed, both Spam and Spambot are closely related to sending junk mail.