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Spam | Habefast

Spam Glossary Habefast

Spam definition

Spam is unwanted mail. Often advertising, it corresponds to a technique of prospecting by unsolicited electronic communication distributed in a massive and automated way. Also known as spam, these e-mails represent ineffective messages from a communication point of view because they generate little conversion rate and are almost always found in the recipients’ mailboxes. 

The different types of spam

Spam can have different purposes, since it can be used for advertising, commercial announcements or scams. In fact, we distinguish the main types of spam:

 

  • Advertising spam

  • Spam that contains a scam attempt

  • Phishing spam (or pishing) aimed at extracting identifiers by impersonating a service or company's communication.

  • There is also spam or malware, which refers to malicious software that can compromise the security of a device. Often, these harmful links are transmitted in the form of forum or blog posts.

All are conducted on a large scale and it appears today on other media. Email remains the preferred medium of the spammer but there is also content spam or link spam, which aims to improve the ranking of the site on the search results pages by abusing SEO methods. Also, sms spam is very much used.   

What is the extent of spam?

It is a phenomenon of such magnitude, that it has its own lexical field: spam, spammer, spammer. It is also used today in everyday language to designate repeated and undesirable interventions.

In the 2000’s, spam represented 90% of all e-mails received. Today, this percentage has decreased but still represents, according to altospam statistics, the majority of received mails with almost 66% of the total received mails. According to some statistical institutes, spam could cause employees of some companies to lose up to 10 minutes a day.

Faced with such a magnitude, many anti-spam techniques are put in place to prevent them from polluting the mailboxes. These filters consist in sorting out unsolicited messages and removing them directly from your inbox. This filtering is available on many email systems and is relatively effective in sorting and adjusting the criteria for defining unwanted, advertising or useful messages. You can also set up a blacklist system so that you do not receive any more spam.