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Snowshoe spam is getting past email filters

Spam. Not meat that comes in a can. This type of spam is the high-tech kind. Spammers blast out emails to unsuspecting recipients to try to get them to buy something or otherwise act on their messages.

Spam has been around almost as long as email has. At first we just lived with it. But then it got so bad things had to be done to at least mitigate it. Companies and email providers have been pretty successful with filtering spam from in-boxes. But now there's a new way spammers are succeeding at getting to your inbox.

It is called snowshoe spam which is challenging traditional spam filters. This new way of sending you unsolicited email is metaphorically similar to a snowshoe. Snowshoes cover an area much wider than your shoe which keeps you from sinking into deep snow by spreading out your weight. This new spam uses many IP addresses instead of just one and sends low volumes of email from each IP address. This makes it much harder to detect since most filters look at high volumes of emails from a single IP address.

One thing that keeps spam coming is that it is very successful. Spammers can make a lot of money by simply blasting ad emails to tens or even hundreds of thousands of addresses. Even if only a small percentage of the emails get through -- and get read -- and are acted upon, the sheer number of them give good returns.

So if you have noticed an increase of spam in your inbox recently snowshoe spam is likely the reason for it. And unfortunately until new spam filters are successful you can't do much about it. But you can just delete it, which if everyone did we wouldn't have this problem in the first place.