What is Spam?

Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages, often with commercial content. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is applicable to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet forum spam and junk fax transmissions.

Spam in e-mail started to become a problem when the Internet was opened up to the general public in the mid-1990s. It grew exponentially over the following years, and today comprises some 80 to 85% of all the email in the world, by conservative estimate; some sources go as high as 95%.

Spamming is economically viable because advertisers have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists, and it is difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings. Spammers hence are numerous, and the volume of unsolicited mail has become very high.

What are the risks?

At a minimum, spam results in lost productivity amongst spam recipients, as they sift through and or expunge the spam. Additionally as the data networks are being overburdened with spam traffic, end users may be impacted by delayed an slow responses.

Internet service providers are forced to add extra capacity to cope with the spam deluge. Additionally e-mail programs add features to detect and filter spam. The additional cost of all these efforts is shared by the public and Internet providers.

But perhaps the most damaging consequence of spam is the potential for fraud. Spam often contains links or pop-ups that spammers use to gain access to your computers and perpetrate identity theft.  

Spamming is widely reviled, and has been the subject of legislation in many jurisdictions.

At the same time, it is becoming clear that malware authors, spammers, and phishers are learning from each other, and possibly forming various kinds of partnerships.

E-mail is an extremely cheap mass medium, and professional spammers have automated their processes to a high extent. Thus, spamming can be very profitable even at what would otherwise be considered extremely low response rates.

An industry of e-mail address harvesting is dedicated to collecting email addresses and selling compiled databases. Millions of email addresses can be cheaply purchased.

What can you do about spam?