Anyone who uses email accounts ends up facing the spamming practices of a spammer sooner or later.

This is because in the age of digital marketing and online business, people’s data and information is worth a lot.

In other words, if you have the right contacts, you’re halfway to successful marketing.

Linked to this is email, which is a very efficient means of communication at a really low cost compared to other digital media.

What’s more, email marketing has a significant ROI (return on investment), representing a return of US$ 42 for every US$ 1 invested.

It’s a very attractive return and, for this reason, the spammer looks for a shortcut to try to take advantage of this profitability, building huge lists by any means and at any price.

In other words, anyone who is reached by the messages sent by the spammer (the spammed) ends up making a profit.

However, a person who builds up a list of contacts through spamming practices is susceptible to a series of penalties, such as inclusion on international blacklists, blockings, spam boxes and the fines and sanctions applied by the LGPD. After all, sending spam is an act that violates the law.

The recipients’ providers block spam lists and send the identification of the owners of these lists to blacklists around the world, which hits the sender’s reputation hard. Not to mention the penalties imposed by the LGPD.

But why do so many people still insist on being spammer? Let’s find out what these people are up to.

What a spammer wants?

For a spammer, most actions revolve around attempts at financial gain, starting with the collection of email addresses for “marketing” purposes, among others.

One of these methods, known as email harvesting, crawls various websites, blogs, forums and other web services in search of email addresses.

It works as follows: the robot does the harvesting (as the name implies) and creates giant databases for the spammer himself or so that he can sell them to companies and professionals who are not concerned about the law and good practices, and who are unaware of the damage caused by a list built in this way.

Another method of creating spam mailing lists is scraped lists. But here, only corporate addresses are gathered into a list.

The bot works by cross-referencing the most common names of corporate addresses (sales@; financial@; customer-service@, etc.) with all possible domains. This process creates endless lists of emails.

This creates a base full of bounces and invalid emails. It’s always worth remembering that lists containing 3% bounces are blocked by the recipients’ ISPs.

Another way the spammer seeks to gain an advantage is by disseminating emails containing links to phishing and ransonware malware.

In this case, these emails involve sending mass messages with links that, once clicked, install malicious software that can steal users’ information or install programs that capture and encrypt victims’ data.

The spammer then makes financial transactions in the victim’s name or hijacks their data and demands payment to return it.

There is also a third way in which the spammer seeks a financial advantage: by sending advertisements to unsuspecting recipients. In other words, mass emails that can sell.

What the sender forgets is that spam filters are very careful to identify these emails. And then they block them, sending the sending domain and its IPs to blacklists.

How to stay away from spammer actions

For professionals

Spammers mean headaches for both digital marketers and ordinary consumers.

The secret to staying away from spammers is to build an email list in the right way, containing real, active, permission-based leads.

One of the ways to do this is through rich content such as ebooks, webinars, among others, which are interesting and catch the public’s attention.

You then create ways of obtaining the data, such as a registration form, through which the lead has access to the material or event by filling in their details (which include their email address).

The form must also contain the opt-in, which is the request for the recipient’s consent to store and process data and to receive emails from the company.

It is important to note that the form integrated with a real-time verification API guarantees a clean list free of invalid emails. In this way, a campaign with great potential for success is born.

In other words, email marketers should never do email harvesting or exchange leads with other professionals or companies. That way, spam is kept completely off the lists.

For consumers

The worst thing about spam for the average consumer is the risk of scams. So when you receive an email with an appealing subject line, don’t open it.

Likewise, don’t click on anything suspicious and don’t open attachments either. Don’t respond to requests to update your registration, regardless of the company.

Criminals are becoming increasingly sophisticated and are able to make identical replicas of legitimate emails. Banks, for example, are targets.

Finally, change your email password frequently and use antivirus scanning on your computer.

How to tell if a sender is a spammer

Blacklists exist to identify spammers. The website blacklistalert.org brings together more than 30 blacklisting services, where you can check whether a domain or IP is a spammer.

To check, simply enter the name in the field and click on the “check” button.

Conclusion

Email marketing is an excellent investment. Proof of this is its ranking as the highest ROI in digital marketing for years.

Spam, on the other hand, represents everything bad about email communication, with damage to the reputation of senders, as well as the spread of malware containing phishing scams, ransonware and other damage.

Therefore, those who use email professionally should avoid spam by building healthy lists and checking their emails regularly.

Consumers should keep an eye on their email passwords and antivirus scans. Both are done frequently.

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