So how in the world do you end up on a spammer’s email list? First off, you need to face facts. Even before you thought of your clever email address, some spammer’s “random email address generator” software came up with it first. However, the spammer didn’t know it was an actual address used by a living, breathing person, until you verified it for them.

“Now, wait a minute, I did no such thing!” you reply. Actually, some people willingly notify spammers that their email address is a “real one”. They click the link at the bottom of the email that says, “Click here to be removed from this mailing list”. When they click the link, a message is sent to the spammer that he’s “found a live one”, and the floodgates open. Obviously, you should never try to remove yourself, or try to get back at the spammer by dealing out your own spam. It’ll just get you in deeper.

Like any pests, spammers adapt quickly when the environment changes. When people wised up and stopped clicking “Reply”, spammers looked for other ways to verify addresses. Their next ploy took advantage of the popularity of HTML email.

In the early days email contained strictly text characters. The receiver could specify the font, size, color, and other limited text qualities used by their reader software to display the message, but there was basically no “customization” capability on the sender’s end.

On the other hand, web pages can be customized extensively. If you look “behind the scenes” at the underlying code that makes up a web page, you’ll discover that it’s all just text. Without getting too deep into what makes up a web page, the underlying code tells the viewer’s web browser what to display, how to display it, and where to go to find all the parts that make up the page. To give emailers more control over the “look” of their email, some smart person said, “Let’s make it so every email can basically be a little web page we send to someone else.” Voila. HTML email.

So, if you have your email program set up to compose emails with lavish fonts, pretty colors, and background images, you’re really being a web designer every time you send an email. The question you have to ask yourself is: do I need all that fluff on every email I send? But, that’s whole ‘nother article.

Spammers love HTML email. They can write code into every HTML email that sends a message back to them that they’ve found a live one at the very moment the email is displayed in your email program or web browser. How is that possible? You didn’t click anything!

When you receive an HTML email with images displayed, those images aren’t usually attached to the email itself – this would cause each message to be too “bulky”. Plus, people have become leery about opening email with attachments. Something about viruses – I don’t know, I’m a Mac user. But, I digress…

Images displayed in spam HTML email are usually “called” from the spammer’s server, and transmitted to your computer when you open the email. That’s why, if you’re a dial-up user and not online all the time, you get those pesky “empty image” icons if you read your mail offline.

So, the spammer can verify you’ve opened his email, and even find out something about the routing the email took, when you open the email and your program loads the image from his server. Sneaky, eh? You can prevent it, though, with a simple click of a button. More next time.

© 2004 Peter F. Zimowski