Email bombing and spam are both forms of email abuse, but they differ in purpose and execution.
Email bombing involves sending a massive volume of emails to a single address or server in a short time, often with the intent to overwhelm the recipient's inbox or crash their email system. This can be a form of denial-of-service (DoS) attack, disrupting normal email operations.
Spam, on the other hand, refers to unsolicited bulk emails sent to many recipients, typically for advertising, phishing, or malware distribution. While spam is annoying and can clog inboxes, it doesn’t usually aim to crash systems—just to flood them with unwanted messages.
Example of Email Bombing: An attacker uses a botnet to send thousands of emails per second to a company’s customer service email, causing the mailbox to exceed storage limits and disrupting operations.
Example of Spam: A user receives hundreds of promotional emails from an unknown sender advertising fake products.
To mitigate such threats, services like Tencent Cloud Anti-Spam and Email Security Solutions can filter malicious emails, block abnormal traffic, and protect inboxes from both spam and email bombing attacks.