Spam typically offers some dubious product or service, like a get rich quick scheme, phone sex, or fantastic health remedies. Spam senders spend relatively little to distribute their messages, leaving most of the time and resource burden on receivers and carriers. Most times a throw-away Internet account or an invented address is used. There are message heading lines, normally not displayed to you, which contain details that may indicate a source.
Email spam targets individual users with direct mail messages.
Address lists are often created by scanning Usenet postings, stealing Internet mailing lists, or searching Web pages for addresses. Despite claims that you were specially selected to receive the mailing, it is unlikely that you were personally targeted. SPAM is a behavioural problem, and is about as easy to counteract with technical methods as littering. In March 2000 we activated blocks on the campus mail servers based on a directory service operated by Mail Abuse Prevention System . Their databases list Internet addresses of systems that are known spam origins, that have been used by spammers to route their mail, and dial-up ports that have no legitimate reason to be sending mail directly to us in the first place.