Spam Unsolicited mass email, typically for advertising purposes, especially if means are used to falsify or conceal the identity of the true sender.
The term is also sometimes applied to unwelcome cross-posting and off-topic posting on Usenet newsgroups, especially mass cross-posting, and to similar abuses of other Internet protocols.
The first version of my site went online in May 1996, and I've always had a mailto feedback link at the bottom of each page. Beginning in August 1997 my original ISP POP-mail address began receiving a steady stream of unsolicited commercial email. For a couple of years I just moved each spam message into a "Spam" folder and tracked the monthly count.
Late in 1999 I was forced to change ISPs, due to circumstances that had nothing to do with spam. Since I was going to have to get a new email address out to all my correspondents anyway, I decided to switch to free browser-based Web-mail, and at the same time began using an alternate "spam-catcher" email address. Initially this was a free Juno mail ID I was already using for testing purposes, then in succession Excite and Lycos Web-mail, and currently Yahoo! Mail.*
I've been using this alternate email address on my site feedback links, and also with any Website I want to do something with, if I have a dark suspicion they might sell my address. I'm much more careful about the use of my primary email address, and never publish it on the Web or newsgroup postings. When my Yahoo ID was my primary this strategy worked reasonably well for about five years.
I was rather expecting some decisive countermeasure from the Internet community that would end the spam problem once and for all, but it hasn't happened. Aside from recent efforts by officialdom to criminalize spamming and prosecute offenders, all available countermeasures I've been aware of have been sort of grass-roots and incremental in nature.
There used to be spammers who had the unmitigated gall to claim that what they were doing was "responsible email telemarketing." Horse muffins. Spam is theft.
Users and organizations pay for Internet connectivity, and often have restrictions on ISP server space they can use. Users in some countries actually pay for Internet access by the minute. Spam attacks affect millions of users, and appropriate some of each user's allotted storage space without permission, and some of each user's personal time periodically to delete the unwanted mail. Resorting to spam also betrays a certain lack of style.
It was reported in The New York Times that Ferris Research estimated the economic cost of spam at $10 billion in 2003 in the US alone, and that corporations spent $120 million that year on anti-spam systems; some other estimates are higher. Some say lost productivity is both the most serious cost of spam and the hardest to quantify. The relentless barrage of spam can cause weary users to delete mail by mistake that they actually need; I've done it myself. Since no filter system is perfect, there are also problems with legitimate mail being blocked by spam filters.
Spamming is increasingly being defined as a criminal offense. The US CAN-SPAM* law went into effect 1 January 2004 but has had little or no effect on spam volumes. As of April 2005, 38 of 50 US states had enacted some sort of anti-spam legislation, some of which may be pre-empted by CAN-SPAM. The UK had new anti-spam regulations effective 11 Dec 2003. The European Union has a number of anti-spam directives, and there is anti-spam legislation in some member countries and in Australia and Canada. The site spamlaws.com, courtesy of law professor David E. Sorkin, has links to anti-spam laws and court cases.
Many would consider phone telemarketing an instructive parallel example, except that phone telemarketing annoyed more people earlier ... often during dinner. The US government eventually responded with the National Do Not Call Registry. In both cases (Internet spam and phone telemarketing) the mere fact that people hate it is enough reason for action, in my opinion.
Never publish your primary email address in scan-able format, on the Web or in postings in Usenet newsgroups.
Even if your email address isn't presented in HTML tags as a clickable mailto link, like this:
<A HREF="mailto:john.doe@isp.com">email me</A>
... but merely as plain non-linked text like john.doe@isp.com, if it's on the public Internet, spammers' scanning software can still recognize it and grab it, by looking for the "@" symbol inside a contiguous string, the latter part of which parses as a domain name.
Don't ever respond to spam with email. This especially includes "remove me" links, which say things like "send email here to be taken off our mailing list." The actual result of sending email to those is typically to verify for the spammers that they have a valid email address in their databases, thereby insuring that you will receive more spam. The only good thing to do with spam email is to delete it (sometimes by reporting it to your system spam filter, see below).
ISPs and free Web-mail services often provide spam filters. Such services will often have provision for reporting any spam not successfully classified as such by the filter; often it's just a mouse click or two. If so, report your unfiltered spam. Such reports generally help fine-tune the spam filtering of the service. On Web-mail services usually the reporting action will include deleting the offending email, or moving it to a "Trash" folder or whatever.
On filtered systems usually you can go through your "Bulk Mail" or "Spam" folder, and if the filter has mistakenly tagged something as spam that's not, you may have a "Not Spam" button to move it back to your Inbox. On Yahoo! Mail you have to view the message before you see their Not Spam button.
Be cautious about giving out your primary email address to e-commerce sites and other businesses and organizations; check their privacy policies, and consider their market position and reputation. If in doubt, don't, or give them your secondary address, if you use one.
Avoid actions that would make the email addresses of others publicly available to spammer software. This would include manually publishing them on a Web page or in a Usenet posting, without the user's permission or any confirmed signup procedure, or inclusion in the sort of primitive mailing list in which other addresses are visible to recipients, again without permission or signup.*
If you use a secondary "spam-catcher" email account, you may want to consider making that secondary account your operating-system default email, rather than your primary account, in case you ever click on a mailto link on the Web while you are preoccupied, sleepy, stressed, under the affluence of incohol, or otherwise distracted.
site feedback