Spam, But my own address !!!!!!!!!

[kevin63]

I have just recieved an email which was a spam thingy, but it was sent as my own address, like when I cliked on the properties it was my address, how can this be.

[malman]

easy, thats what spammers do. All the spam you get you don't think it actually comes from the addresses it says?

its pretty similar to real mail you have an envelope with an address which routes the mail to its destination (you don't see this in your email client by default - bit like a secretary opening your mail and discarding the envelope) then you have the mail inside, the bit you read. I can write any address I like on the mail inside same as with a real letter.

[kevin63]

Shouldn't be allowed, don't see what they get out of that, mind you, it was a nice photo of Britney.

[sadako]

kevin63 said:

Shouldn't be allowed, don't see what they get out of that, mind you, it was a nice photo of Britney.

In many places it isnt allowed, however when the spam is coming from a trojan infected PC in the USA somewhere (about 70% of spam came from machines in the USA IIRC) being operated by a company in some ex-soviet state you can see how it is hard to stop them from doing it. It is the same as people cold calling from India, Even if you have a Do-Not-Call list it cannot prevent people from calling you from another country.

[ThePassenger]

kevin63 said:

Shouldn't be allowed, don't see what they get out of that, mind you, it was a nice photo of Britney.

Money.

It costs next to nothing to get together a bunch of infected PC's (termed Zombies) and then tell them to pump out e-mail as fast as possible to a supplied address list. If you send out say a thousand messages and only ten people respond you've instantly made profit; the goods you're selling are cheap (if you supply at all). When you consider they send out millions of messages and see on average 1% return, you get the idea of how much money they can make.

The stock trading ones are a little different and I'm sure someone more versed in penny shares and pump n' dump schemes can explain it better but... basically it makes the share price go up and then a computer sells it and someone rakes in the money leaving you with dead stock (usually these companies are going under).

As sadako says it is illegal to spam in a lot of places but try enforcing that in Russia or China (most server admins can safely remove the whole Chinese subnet and see no complaints but a drop in spam) or anywhere else in the world with different law enforcement and legislation.

DDoS attacks use the same basic method (Zombies) but directly attack a running process on the machine... like the web server and tie it up; basically it gets so busy trying to deal with these apparently real request nobody else gets a look in.