Sporn—What is it?

By Don Evett

Most people are annoyed by the deluge of spam they receive on a daily basis. Unsolicited advertisements promoting mortgage refinances, travel specials and Viagra offers and can be time consuming and frustrating to sift through while looking for your legitimate email. But one spam category stands out from the rest-spam pornography, or the short term, sporn. Sporn goes beyond annoying. Aggressively marketed and sometimes deceitfully packaged, sporn can be downright destructive—just imagine your young child unwittingly opening an x-rated invitation.

• Email account holders at Hotmail, AOL, and other large ISPs have been targets of pornography spammers for years. It?s easy for spammers to automatically send bulk emails to generic email addresses such as john@aol.com or sally05@hotmail.com. If you happen to own one of these common addresses and end up opening a test email, you have just notified the pornography spammer that the address is not only legitimate but active. This can open floodgates for additional sporn email since your email address can easily be sold to other pornography marketers. Once your address is added to a porn spammer?s list, it is difficult to remove. As explained in Spam Safety Tips, attempting to unsubscribe from one of these pornography spammers is not a good idea.
  
  
• As mentioned in the article Tricks that Pornographers Play, some emails are infamous for transmitting worms or viruses. For example, the worm known as Homepage can modify your browser?s user default home page so that every time you click on your browser you are automatically sent to a porn website.
  
  
• One of the latest techniques used by spammers to trick unsuspecting readers into opening sporn email is to use a technique known as email spoofing—the practice of disguising one?s sender address. Email spoofing serves spammers in two ways?it makes their true address impossible to detect, and, if the spammer is successful in fooling you with a safe-looking return address you may open their sporn. Originally developed as a virus transmitter, this practice works on users who wouldn?t think of opening an email attachment from an unknown person. Aggressive marketers can install a downloaded application to your computer capable of stealing your entire personal email directory, then use it to send innocently-labeled, x-rated emails to all of your friends featuring your email address in the from box.
  
  
• Some emails contain high-tech multimedia video attachments that begin playing hard-core pornography the instant you click on them. Newer email technology even allows a video to be sent as part of the email rather than an attachment?the pornographic video begins playing before you even realize what has happened. A simple mouse rollover can trigger the playing of these unwanted sporn emails.
  
  
• Email greeting cards have become quite popular in the last few years, but some greeting cards are not what you would expect. The following graphic is an example of an email greeting card announcement that takes the browser to a pornographic website when clicked.

Sporn can be reduced, and in many cases, eliminated. A Spam Filter can prevent sporn from making it to your inbox, and by implementing suggestions from Spam Safety Tips you can reduce the risk of being exposed to both spam and sporn. To help with the assault against sporn, read How to Report Spam

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