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SEO EMAIL SPAM


Sending spam mails has become very common today and millions of web surfers are either getting affected by falling for it or getting annoyed as their mail folders are flooded with spam mails.

There is no severe course of action that could be taken against these spammers who send spam mails. Most of the mail services providing servers have a separate folder known as spam folder that can detect some of the spam mails and store them directly under that folder itself. However, still some mails creep through the filters and get inside our inbox. Emails containing spam messages are very easy to detect. The mail will simply contain nonsense or fishy contents. When you find such a mail in your inbox and you read it, all you can do is filter such mails and add a mark against the sender email address to avoid future emails from that particular address. Of course you can lodge a complaint or notify the company whose name has been used in the mail.

Most of these mails ask for certain details for authentication and gather some personal information by alluring you to enter those details. Spammers gather sensitive details such as account information, credit card details etc via this process. Some mails say that you have won a prize and you need to contact them for availing that prize which is either some kind of amount or an expensive gift voucher. Basically, they do this for fun and sadistic pleasures.

Some of these links that allures you visit their website for gathering the prize are automated programs and the moment you click on the link, they upload harmful viruses into your system and damaging it in the process.

And if you do not filter such emails or add a mark against such senders, they tend to keep sending those emails in bulk everyday flooding your mailbox with several spam mails annoying you to the core. And if you do fall for the traps and give into it, you might end up suffering a huge loss as you pass sensitive details to them. Sometimes you don't even have to enter certain details for authentication, the moment you click on their links, the spammers have automated tools to creep into your system and download certain sensitive files for information, and he can also log into your account with certain basic details you might give him, get access to your accounts and withdraw large sums of money.

SEO email-Spam alert

How do the spammers do it and what is SEO spam?

It is very easy to identify spam emails from the senders address itself. If the senders address is unknown to you and has certain fishy information or contents like the ones mentioned above, obviously he/she is a spammer and it is a spam mail.

However, spammers and hackers are also pretty aware of the situation. These days they tend to send emails under reputed and popular names or organizations. Spammers and hackers make use of fake id's and fake popularity to allure you into the trap.

As an expert recently I got a mail from TATA Company regarding a job offer with a very prestigious and handsome pay package. But they asked me for a deposit of 96,000/- Rs before the job offer was finalized. Apparently they confirmed and approved my resume which I had posted long back in many of job forum sites and they offered me the job even without an interview (All the details were mentioned in the mail only). Since the mail was sent from a well reputed company, I researched on the background of the letter using Google. I found out that many have been cheated with the same mail as people have posted the mail itself in public forums and warning those who get such mails. They had also filed a complaint to TATA saying people were misusing the company's name and sending spam mails.

Faking one's identity for alluring people into the trap is the latest revelation in the spam field and spam mails have become very common and predominant everywhere as you can find millions of complaints regarding various spam issues and how spammers indulge in it across several blogs, forums and many other social networking websites. Spammers send spam emails to users to receive backlinks to their sites or just to allure the user with a scam.

SEO email spam is just one variety of the email spam techniques. Under this process, spammers tend to project him as a reputed SEO organization with fake ids. He offers to do SEO services for your websites at a very cheap price or interest. Website owners look forward to develop their business and indulge in ethical search engine optimization techniques for promoting their websites respectively.

Spammers make use of this vulnerability factor and tend to lure millions of website owners towards outsourcing the search engine optimization business to them. They give you fake promises such as hundreds of search engine submissions to several popular search engines (You don't need to practice search engine submissions explicitly these days as crawlers and spiders can crawl find your WebPages, in fact overdoing it might lead to the ban of your site), practice unethical SEO tactics to project your website in the top etc. of course, these unethical tactics will help your website to raise to the top, but since malpractices have been adopted, it will be identified sooner or later and then your website will be banned eventually. Meanwhile before it gets banned without knowing what is happening, you end up paying for the services of these spammers and hackers just because they charge you cheaper for the SEO tactics and maintenance of your website.

Also it is very difficult to avoid them as they keep spamming your inbox with hundreds of emails about their SEO services at cheaper cost rates trying to lure you into the trap. They send these spam mails via automated programs and tools that send identical messages to numerical applicants. So if you receive a suspicious mail, if you do a thorough research upon it using popular search engines, you are most likely to find forums and blogs where people might have posted the same email as it was word by word. 

The only thing you can do about these spam mails is to make use of the filter option provided by your mail service providers. However, still these spammers have a way to creep into your inbox avoiding the filters. They make use of dynamic ids which keeps altering every time. So next time when you receive the same spam mail with the same contents, you are most likely to get the mail from a different sender id.

Spammers tend to collect email ids of different users from chat rooms, websites, customer databases, newsgroups, social networking sites etc. They also make use of automated tools that implants viruses which surfs through the web automatically and gather details from millions of web surfers address books and profiles and other sensitive details including account details, credit card information and what not. They also make use of a practice known as email appending or epending wherein they use known information of their targets such as postal address and other sensitive details to search for target's email addresses. Once they receive it which in most cases they end up being successful in doing so, they send bulk spam emails to your account every day. They are not bothered about whether you fall for it or not. They do the same for numerous recipients and at most times 30% of the recipients fall for the trap. You might be lucky enough if you are one among the other 70%. They do it for fun and they get good profit out of the sure shot 30% of the victims.

Much of the spam is also sent to invalid email addresses. It is more like a random process that depends upon probabilities, permutations and combinations. Today, unfortunately spam averages to about 78% of all emails that have been sent across internet. They make use of automated tools and fake dynamic ids that it becomes almost impossible to track them down and put an end to their annoying and harmful tactics. The people who fall for it also pay a heavy price for it. It is very important you do a thorough research on the background of the email before falling for it especially when it comes to SEO email spam (that allures you into the trap by offering cheap SEO services).

Placing a URL inside a "call-to-action" email continues to be widely used of search marketing spam. With the advent of desktop search appliances, these junk emails have increased drastically. It is not done to promote one's website when it comes to SEO email spam, but rather for fun and cheating millions of web surfers by gathering their private and personal information and misusing it. Alarmingly, though people are quite aware of such practices, 30% of the population or the recipients do fall for it still. Popular search engines, reputed firms whose names have been misused, victims who have been affected etc are still fighting against it. On your part, though you might not be one among the victims, it is very important that you report such activities or spam emails at all cost and provide your sincere support so that we can put an end to this nonsense.


Images

Spammers sources

Sample e-mail
Example of spam mail

Screen Shots

Click on the images to enlarge!

SEOs on SEO Email spam Spam mailing for SEO SEO email spam

Spam SEO emails

Graph

The statistics shown below states that about 75% of mails received are spam emails sent from some SEO comapny to various users. And the amount of relevant mails received are comparatively less.

Statistics on SEO email spam

Survey
Email spam trends

A survey was conducted to ascertain the spam trends in email. It was conducted from the period Aug 2011 to Aug 2012. As seen, the percentage of unsolicited mails reached 76% in Aug 2011 after which it gradually dropped , the reason being overall heightened level of anti-spam protection.


Working Examples


This is an example of SEO email spam, where the company sends unsolicited emails to large number of users without any subscription. It is mentioned that this is a one time email but the same email has been received nearly 3-4 times.


This is an example of SEO email spam, where the company sends unsolicited emails to large number of users without any subscription. It is mentioned that this is a one time email but the same email has been received nearly 3-4 times.


References

  1. SEO spam are you sick of it?

  2. Spam SEO e-mails

  3. The art of SEO e-mail link spam

Other sites that refer to the same manipulation tactic are as follows


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