What is the point of this kind of spam?

Question

I am recieving a huge amount of spam all of a sudden. It is strange, it is coming from a large variety of addresses, and often looks like personal letters, or parts of reports on lots of different subjects. It is annoying, and yet i am more annoyed at the fact that i don't see a purpose. There are no ads, or offers to buy or sell anything, its just rubbish. They come with attachments, which of course i never open, but really, who would send this kind of thing, and what is the point?

sorry, just to add some more detail, i am adding each adress to my block list as it comes, but it simply comes from more and more adresses each time. Also there is no unsubscribe option in them, they don't look like subscription emails either, just a continuing assortment of random articles and letters, and only ever partial.

Answer 1

Someone found your email address and put it on a list. Spammers trade and sell their lists, so you will never get off the list. You could cancel the email address and get a new one, but you'll have to remember to tell all your friends and acquaintances. And eventually someone will find your new address as well. Spammers don't remove old or bad addresses. It doesn't matter to them if they spam one million email addresses or two million email addresses.

Reviewing responses to the "please remove me" email address is just a way for spammers to confirm that an address is valid.

The odds are good that the spams with a lot of random words have images attached. The image is actually an picture advertisement for the spammer's scam (stock, cheap drugs, mortgage loan paperwork, etc.) Many mail readers (like Outlook and Thunderbird) will show you a preview of the image, which is why spammers use this technique. The text is to try and fool any email filtering software into thinking that the message is legitimate (filtering software looks for key words, among other things, so if all the spam language is in an image, they think the filters won't catch it).

I would suggest utilizing any spam filtering options available to you through your email provider. Good luck!

Answer 2

People spam because it works and no one does anything about it.
There is a simple solution:

Everytime you get spam, do a search for the company or stock mentioned. EMAIL them with the spam as an attachment. Mention the subject: Spam with YOUR name used (put name of stock or company in this space)
In the body, offer to help in any criminal or legal action against the spammer and mention that you are forwarding a copy to the proper authorities (do so if you can find them).

If we all do this, a lot of companies are going to be irritated at the bad publicity generated by this, and will do something to stop the spammer involved.

Who's with me?

Answer 3

if u dont want to receive the spam mail again
try to turn on ur spam settings
and type the addresses of the spam mail to block address bar
they come from everywhere

Answer 4

i think someone has submitted ur email to manu places,
open each email - it might contain a link to unsubscribe and use the link

Answer 5

whatever you do, don't respond to the spam by trying to unsubscribe... all your doing is telling the spam-server that you really do exist... its like saying "yes, send me more spam please"