Chapter 16. WEBBOTS THAT SEND EMAIL

In Chapter 15 you learned how to create webbots that read email. In this chapter I'll show you how to write webbots that can create massive amounts of email. On that note, let's talk briefly about email ethics.

Email, Webbots, and Spam

Spam has negatively influenced all of our email experiences.[52] It was probably only a few years ago that every email in one's inbox had some value and deserved to be read. Today, however, my spam filter (a proxy service that examines email headers and content to determine if the email is legitimate or a potential scam) rejects roughly 80 percent of the email I receive, flagging it as unwanted solicitation at best and, at worst, a phishing attack—email that masquerades itself ...

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