what is exactly spam, and what does it do?

Question

i dont understand anything at all about spam. what harm it can cause also why i cant send e-mail to people who have spam gaurd. if i run a system check will my computer tell me if its infected?

Answer 1

spam doesnt do anything to you beside wasting your time to read it (and if u follow the link given from the spam message u'll be wasting your time even more) ... also spam doesnt cause any harm to you and your computer the only way to avoid spam is by using spam filtering software (there's alot available)

and the definition of spam it self from wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_%28electronic%29

Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited, bulk messages. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is also applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, and mobile phone messaging spam.

Answer 2

Hey i would love to answer this question. Have you ever received an email trying to sell you something, ever wondered people want to meet you and you even don't know them. Sometimes you might have received an email asking ou to claim a prize that you won for a game you never played. All these email had junk info, not related to you, or from addresses you never knew. So all this emails are considered as junk so these emails are called as SPAM. Technical word. Spam mails can be annoying. They can clog your email space, once when you get a lot of them you will be fed up by deleting cuz you got alot of them. Some emails that are spam might contain link asking you to claim a prize and will ask you to fill in your details. So you end up in revealing your personal info and inviting more spam emails. Sometime some emails claim to update your bank account or they seem to be from some government organisation asking you to enter your personal details like SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER, DRIVERS LICENSE NUMBER, BANK ACCOUNT NUMBER. So if you enter and if that mail was a spam you will end up with a mess. That was a little about spam mails and what all it could do. Well even if your computer is infected or Clean that has very little or nothing to do with spam. So ensure do not put your emails address in untrusted mailing list or websites.

Answer 3

well spam is not exactly the email containing the VIRUS, it's the form of sending email to unknown persons, by creating a program, which just sends email to a particular domain, by guessing the email id's or using the email database of that domain, or may be getting the email id's from some other source.

spam, may contain anything - Video, Virus, Worms, blah blah blah.....

Answer 4

You have asked three questions.
1.what is exactly spam, and what does it do?
2. Spam Guard
3. if i run a system check will my computer tell me if its infected?

You wil have answer for spam below but before that Spam guard is setting by which you can avoid spam mails.
Not by system check by Anti virus software you can know if your pc is infected or not. Better install some Anti virus software of good quality.

Here is about sapam but you can find in detal if you click the link below.

Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited, bulk messages. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is also applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, and mobile phone messaging spam.

Spamming is economically viable because advertisers have effectively no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists. Because the barrier to entry is so low, the volume of unsolicited mail has produced other costs which are borne by the public (in terms of lost productivity and fraud) and by Internet service providers, which must add extra capacity to cope with the deluge. Spamming is widely reviled, and has been the subject of legislation in a number of jurisdictions.

E-mail spam
Main article: E-mail spam
E-mail spam is by far the most common form of spamming on the internet. It involves sending identical or nearly identical unsolicited messages to a large number of recipients. Unlike legitimate commercial e-mail, spam is generally sent without the explicit permission of the recipients, and frequently contains various tricks to bypass e-mail filters. Modern computers generally come with some ability to send spam. The only necessary added ingredient is the list of addresses to target.

Spammers obtain e-mail addresses by a number of means: harvesting addresses from Usenet postings, DNS listings, or Web pages; guessing common names at known domains (known as a dictionary attack); and "e-pending" or searching for e-mail addresses corresponding to specific persons, such as residents in an area. Many spammers utilize programs called web spiders to find e-mail addresses on web pages, although it is possible to fool the web spider by substituting the "@" symbol with another symbol, for example "#", while posting an e-mail address.

Many e-mail spammers go to great lengths to conceal the origin of their messages. They might do this by spoofing e-mail addresses (similar to Internet protocol spoofing). In this technique, the spammer modifies the e-mail message so it looks like it is coming from another e-mail address. However, many spammers also make it easy for recipients to identify their messages as spam by placing an ad phrase in the From field—very few people have names like "GetMyCigs" or "Giving away playstation3s"!

Among the tricks used by spammers to try to circumvent the filters is to intentionally misspell common spam filter trigger words. For example, "viagra" might become "vaigra", or other symbols may be inserted into the word as in "v/i/a/g./r/a". The human mind can handle a surprising degree of corruption, but sometimes this tactic can backfire, rendering a message illegible. ISPs have begun to use the misspellings themselves as a filtering test.

The most dedicated spammers—often those making a great deal of money or engaged in illegal activities, such as the pornography, casinos and Nigerian scammers—are often one step ahead of the ISPs. Reporting them to your ISP may help block less sophisticated spammers in the future.

So-called "spambots" are a major producer of e-mail spam. The worst spammers create e-mail viruses that will render an unprotected PC a "zombie computer"; the zombie will inform a central unit of its existence, and the central unit will command the "zombie" to send a low volume of spam. This allows spammers to send high volumes of e-mail without being caught by their ISPs or being tracked down by antispammers; a low volume of spam is instead sent from many locations simultaneously. Many consumer-level ISPs (Earthlink, for example) stop spambots by blocking the SMTP port (port 25), although there are some users who make legitimate use of it.

Answer 5

spam is basically pop ups and crap u dont care about