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E-mail spam or junk e-mail involves nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients by e-mail. It is the most common form of spam nowadays. A common synonym for spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail (UBE). Spammers collect e-mail addresses from chatrooms, websites, customer lists, newsgroups, and viruses which harvest users’ address books, and are sold to other spammers. They also use a practice known as e-mail appending or epending in which they use known information about their target (such as a postal address) to search for the target’s email address. Much of spam is sent to invalid e-mail addresses. Spam averages 78% of all e-mail sent.

• Appending: If a marketer has one database containing names, addresses, and telephone numbers of prospective customers, they can pay to have their database matched against an external database containing email addresses. The company then has the means to send email to persons who have not requested email, which may include persons who have deliberately withheld their email address.
• Image spam: Image spam is an obfuscating method in which the text of the message is stored as a GIF or JPEG image and displayed in the email. This prevents text based spam filters from detecting and blocking spam messages.
• Blank spam: Blank spam is spam lacking a payload advertisement. Often the message body is missing altogether, as well as the subject line. Still, it fits the definition of spam because of its nature as bulk and unsolicited email.
• Backscatter spam: Backscatter is a side-effect of e-mail spam, viruses and worms, where email servers receiving spam and other mail send bounce messages to an innocent party. This occurs because the original message’s envelope sender is forged to contain the e-mail address of the victim. A very large proportion of such e-mail is sent with a forged From: header, matching the envelope sender.