Email Address Harvesting

First, we guarantee that nobody on our domain, nor anybody affiliated with us use SPAM tactics for advertising any products. Through different methods our domain and/or email accounts associated with our domain have been added to SPAM lists.

BOTS

The usual tactic for harvesting email addresses is by the use of BOTS. Bots are automated programs that will scan the Internet for anything that looks like an email address, harvest it, and add it to a master list.  These lists are then sold to companies who employ spamming as a regular part of their advertising.

Worms

Worms are basically spyware installed on your computer that tantalize people into clicking some generated request. A common one is an IM Worm such as those found on MSN Messenger. A message is delivered for you to click a link that will tell you who has blocked you (for example). When you click this link you become infected with this worm. The worm now scans areas of your computer and sends any email addresses it finds back to a central location, where the found addresses are then added to a list.

Human Carelessness

The most common form of a human being careless is by leaving long lists of CC'd addresses in an email when forwarding. If a single person you are forwarding to has a bot attack, or a worm on their computer, this entire list of CC'd addresses is harvested. The best way to prevent this is to use BCC instead of CC, and to strip out the long list of names from where this email has come from.

I hate to say it, but the reason most spam is around these days is because of people being careless and simply forwarding an email in it's raw form for whatever reason.  With a bit of care and editing, we can eventually eliminate spam, or at least reduce it.

Things to Avoid

Who has you blocked? Who cares. If somebody has blocked you, they obviously don't want to talk to you - return the favour.

Click here and forward this email to everybody to find your true love. I'm not even going to comment on the stupidity of this. If you need an email to tell you who your true love is - you spend too much time on the computer.

If a user named [insert name] sends you an email ....  forward this to everybody. These are called hoaxes. They have been around since email began. If ANY user sends you an email and you don't know them - don't open it. This is Email Etiquette 101 !!!!

The bottom line - you will NEVER receive any type of Spam email from mcsbrockville[dot]com - if you do, simply ignore it, delete it, do not email me about it - it wasn't us !!