Who’s your daddy? And What Does He Do

I see this regularly in my inbox, listed along with other tantilizing subjects that offer to grow my breasts or my penis or even enable me to get rich quick. Hell, I even get spam from people trying to get me to spam. But this one is pretty cool, as far as spam subject headings go. I still haven’t clicked on it yet… I’m wary.

You see, being a techno-geek, I know something that the general public doesn’t know. Even if you don’t download the attachments, or respond to the email address that promises to remove you from the mailing list, which actually just subscribes you to more lists. What I know is that if you use any e-mail client, including a web browser on Yahoo or Hotmail, and you read e-mail in “web page” format, meaning you allow HTML formatting or images to come through, you are increasing the amount of spam you will receive.

“How So?” you ask. “I don’t click on anything. I don’t run attachments. I don’t respond to the emails. I don’t request removal from the list. I even run Norton Antivirus with Script-Blocking as an Outlook plugin, so they can’t send me worms or viruses.”

Here’s how it works:

Spammers have special software that generates their emails for them. In these emails, they embed a link to an image on a server somewhere on their server. For example, it could look like this:

They then store a unique identifier that links that particular image with your email address. For example, if the image was named columbia.gif on their server, they create a link called 81038131800010883 and link it to columbia.gif. Then, in your email, they code a link using 81038131800010883 as source. When the server detects that 81038131800010883 has been served, it queries the database and pulls up your e-mail address and files some information that the spammer now knows about you:

1. that you read the specific message
2. you read your mail “on-line”
3. the address they used to send you the message is valid
4. you use an HTML e-mail reader and are therefore capable of receiving more HTML-code within e-mails

This is just one of the many tricks used by spammers, and it’s not just limited to unsolicited e-mail. Many companies use this trick in their email customer service programs. It allows them to track user data and effectiveness concerning e-mail and web marketing campaigns. Many times, the spammers and corporations utilize other methods to collect your information such as coding unique identifiers into URLs, but that’s a topic for another day.