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By Spam Blocker
What is Spam?
From time to time, anyone with an email address will receive offers or advertisements for services in their inbox. Spam is a problem, which most people encounter when it comes to the use of computers. This is the unwelcome receipt of e-mails and the automatic pop up of unwanted windows. From the sender's point-of-view, it's a form of bulk mail, often to a list culled from subscribers to a Usenet discussion group or obtained by companies that specialize in creating e-mail distribution lists.
To the receiver, it usually seems like junk e-mail. In general, it's not considered good netiquette to send spam. It's generally equivalent to unsolicited phone marketing calls except that the user pays for part of the message since everyone shares the cost of maintaining the Internet.
A first-hand report indicates that the term is derived from a famous Monty Python sketch ("Well, we have Spam, tomato & Spam, egg & Spam, Egg, bacon & Spam...") that was current when spam first began arriving on the Internet. Spam is a trademarked Hormel meat product that was well-known in the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II.
It seems to be only a mild nuisance and something that can be taken care of with just a push of the delete key. For most email users, however, these advertisements can become a serious problem - even to the point of causing the loss of important data. Think of your physical mailbox. What would happen if it became so clogged with junk mail every day that your bank statement ended up in the ditch or a letter from your mother lost forever? This is what happens to those whose email address ends up in the hands of a spammer.
Some apparently unsolicited e-mail is, in fact, e-mail people agreed to receive when they registered with a site and checked a box agreeing to receive postings about particular products or interests. This is known as both opt-in e-mail and permission-based e-mail.
Spammers steal machine time and bandwidth to do their deeds. The sheer volume of spam generated is the reason why. Roughly half was tied up in lost productivity as it takes the average person 4.4 seconds to deal with a spam message. The other half was a real cost to corporations in IT staff time, server and software upgrades, and tracking down the source of the attack. In the same way, spammers steal from you at home. You pay for the bandwidth they send their messages on, you have to take the time to filter or add blocks and rules to prevent the influx, and you have to deal with the loss of any data that might occur as a result of their efforts
Another reason that spam is unlike regular mail is in the content of the advertising. Pyramid schemes, chain letters, and fraudulent scams are federal crimes, especially when perpetuated through the US Post Office. X rated material has laws governing the method in which they are sent. Computer viruses cannot be physically mailed to you, but they can come in spam. While these laws also apply to email, the internet is not a government office. There is no postman available to look for violations of that law. When an Internet Service Provider, or ISP, shuts down a spammer's account, they merely open a new one elsewhere.
Spam can be generated from untraceable accounts that give the spanner anonymity. Regular mail has postmarks that identify the location from which it was sent, even if the return address is a false one. Spam can come from anywhere in the world, outside of the jurisdiction of most policing agencies where the receiver lives. This just emboldens the spammer to continue. If you are the victim of spam that contains advertisement of extremely lurid and offensive content describing acts that are, in most societies, illegal, the offender is likely in another country. If it originated within the United States, you could - and should - turn it over to the FBI.
Why, then, do they do it? Money, pure and simple is the answer. No matter how many people they anger, they only need a small percentage, 0.0001% by most estimates,
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