When a spammer sends a message, he has several goals. First, the
message must make it through one or more spam filters. These
filters may scan the message for "spammy keywords" at an ISP,
a web host and at the user's own system (and potentially other
places as well).
An especially annoying type of spam is called a "self sending
spam". This is a spam message which you receive and the "From:"
address is your own email address, or some variation of it. For
example, davesmith@example.com might receive an email with a
from of "davesmith@anotherexample.com. Sometimes the email has
your exact same email address in the "From:" field, making it
appear you've sent the message to yourself.
Why do the spammers bother to do this?
It makes the receiver more likely to open the message - Studies
have shown that people like seeing their own name. Researchers
have found much higher response rates from emails sent in which
the sender had the same first name as the receiver.
It appears to make it harder to trace the spammer - Actually,
spammers tend to forge just about everything in the email
message, and thus are often difficult to trace. However, making
the "From:" address the same makes it appear hopeless to try and
find the sender. After all, it is obviously (unless you look
deeper into the message header) wrong. So why do any more
searching?
It confuses some automated spam reporting programs and scripts -
Some programs and scripts have the ability to report spam
(automatically or upon command) to various places. The software
attempts to determine who sent the spam so it can be reported
to the ISP, web host and anyone else who can do something about
it. Some of the less intelligent spam reporting software will
become confused by self-sending spam and actually cause the
receiver of the spam to report himself as a spammer (this
actually happened to me once).
It looks more legitimate - Spammers have to put something in
the "From:" field - it may as well be your name or something
close to it. They cannot use their own email address (for fear
of being shut down) and some strange, random string of characters
is not very appealing. So why not just use your own name? It
sure makes creating the spam message esay.
What kinds of issues does self-sending spam cause?
Autoresponders - Self-sending spam causes problems for
autoresponders. An autoresponder is an email address which
returns a message to the sender (the "From:" or "Reply-to:"
address). This is a very common method for returning information
to people upon request. When one of these self-sending spam
messages is sent to an autoresponder, a message is returned -
to the sender, which, in this case, is the autoresponder address.
Unless the autoresponder code can detect this condition (and
most modern ones do), a nasty looping condition can result. An
email server can literally send thousands or hundreds of
thousands of messages to itself (I've seen it happen and it's
not pretty).
Bounce messages - Bounce messages may get returned to you instead
of the sender. Not very useful.
Is self-sending spam legal?
As with most legal questions on the internet, the answer is
short but not very satisfying. It depends. Some countries have
other things to worry about than spam, or they simply do not
care. Even if they did, trying to mount a legal challenge in
another country might be difficult. In actual fact, trying to
even find a spammer can be quite a challenge, and suing, even
in your own country, can be a hopeless task.
What can you do?
Get good spam filters and just eliminate as much of this junk
mail as you can. Never, ever purchase anything from a spammer.
In fact, just delete the messages without even opening them.
About the Author
Richard Lowe Jr. is the webmaster of Internet Tips And Secrets
at http://www.internet-tips.net - Visit our website any time to
read over 1,000 complete FREE articles about how to improve your
internet profits, enjoyment and knowledge.
