Junkmail

The term junk mail ( junk = "garbage" or "junk") comes from English and is synonymous with the word spam. It defines the masses of unsolicited e-mails that are sent today for advertising purposes, or e-mails that contain viruses or worms. These are malicious programs that can harm the PC or steal sensitive data. Junk mail causes considerable damage worldwide due to the increased amounts of data and their processing. It is technically not very complex to generate and send such mails, which of course increases the number of spams. To send such e-mails, you only need e-mail addresses to which you can send spam e-mails, an e-mail program and an SMTP relay server. These servers then send the spam e-mails to the desired addresses. In the past, open servers were usually "hijacked" in order to then send the spam e-mails via them. In the meantime, however, this is prevented by so-called "black lists". These contain the data of senders of such mails and prevent them from being able to get rid of their mails. Another protection that is now standard in antivirus programs, e-mail clients and mail hosts is the junk mail filter. This filter blocks the senders of such undesired mails, although they cannot recognize every junk mail, most of them are slowed down. Another way to curb the flood of spam is not to pass on your email address thoughtlessly. You often need an email address to register in forums or other offers on the Internet. It is advisable to use a so-called "disposable address" for this purpose, these are only valid for a certain period of time, but are sufficient to register. Should this address then get into the hands of the junk mail sender, the mails will come to nothing. However, if it is necessary to enter a permanently valid address, this can also be "falsified" because the programs (robot programs) that automatically collect email addresses cannot then evaluate them. An example of this would be to replace the @ character in the address with "at". Because a human does not understand this change the program however.