Electronic spamming is the use of electronic messaging
systems to send an unsolicited message (spam), especially advertising,
as well as sending messages repeatedly on the same site. While the most widely
recognized form of spam is email spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in
other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine
spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, online classified ads spam, mobile phone
messaging spam, Internet forum spam, junk fax transmissions, social spam, spam
mobile apps, television advertising and file sharing spam. It is named after Spam,
a luncheon meat, by way of a Monty Python sketch about a restaurant that has
Spam in every dish and where patrons annoyingly chant "Spam!" over
and over again.
Spamming remains economically viable because advertisers have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists, servers, infrastructures, IP ranges, and domain names, and it is difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings. Because the barrier to entry is so low, spammers are numerous, and the volume of unsolicited mail has become very high. In the year 2011, the estimated figure for spam messages is around seven trillion. The costs, such as lost productivity and fraud, are borne by the public and by Internet service providers, which have been forced to add extra capacity to cope with the deluge. Spamming has been the subject of legislation in many jurisdictions.
A person who creates electronic spam is called a spammer.
The earliest documented spam (although the term had not yet been coined) was a message advertising the availability of a new model of Digital Equipment Corporation computers sent by Gary Thuerk to 393 recipients on ARPANET in 1978. Rather than send a separate message to each person, which was the standard practice at the time, he had an assistant, Carl Gartley, write a single mass email. Reaction from the net community was fiercely negative, but the spam did generate some sales.
Spamming had been practiced as a prank by participants in multi-user dungeon games, to fill their rivals' accounts with unwanted electronic junk. The first known electronic chain letter, titled Make Money Fast, was released in 1988.
The first major commercial spam incident started on March 5, 1994, when a husband and wife team of lawyers, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, began using bulk Usenet posting to advertise immigration law services. The incident was commonly termed the "Green Card spam", after the subject line of the postings. Defiant in the face of widespread condemnation, the attorneys claimed their detractors were hypocrites or "zealouts", claimed they had a free speech right to send unwanted commercial messages, and labeled their opponents "anti-commerce radicals". The couple wrote a controversial book entitled How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway.
Within a few years, the focus of spamming (and anti-spam efforts) moved chiefly to email, where it remains today. Arguably, the aggressive email spamming by a number of high-profile spammers such as Sanford Wallace of Cyber Promotions in the mid-to-late 1990s contributed to making spam predominantly an email phenomenon in the public mind. By 1999, Khan C. Smith, a well known hacker at the time, had begun to commercialize the bulk email industry and rallied thousands into the business by building more friendly bulk email software and providing internet access illegally hacked from major ISPs such as Earthlink and Botnets.
By 2009, the majority of spam sent around the World was in the English language; spammers began using automatic translation services to send spam in other languages
Spamming remains economically viable because advertisers have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists, servers, infrastructures, IP ranges, and domain names, and it is difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings. Because the barrier to entry is so low, spammers are numerous, and the volume of unsolicited mail has become very high. In the year 2011, the estimated figure for spam messages is around seven trillion. The costs, such as lost productivity and fraud, are borne by the public and by Internet service providers, which have been forced to add extra capacity to cope with the deluge. Spamming has been the subject of legislation in many jurisdictions.
A person who creates electronic spam is called a spammer.
The earliest documented spam (although the term had not yet been coined) was a message advertising the availability of a new model of Digital Equipment Corporation computers sent by Gary Thuerk to 393 recipients on ARPANET in 1978. Rather than send a separate message to each person, which was the standard practice at the time, he had an assistant, Carl Gartley, write a single mass email. Reaction from the net community was fiercely negative, but the spam did generate some sales.
Spamming had been practiced as a prank by participants in multi-user dungeon games, to fill their rivals' accounts with unwanted electronic junk. The first known electronic chain letter, titled Make Money Fast, was released in 1988.
The first major commercial spam incident started on March 5, 1994, when a husband and wife team of lawyers, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, began using bulk Usenet posting to advertise immigration law services. The incident was commonly termed the "Green Card spam", after the subject line of the postings. Defiant in the face of widespread condemnation, the attorneys claimed their detractors were hypocrites or "zealouts", claimed they had a free speech right to send unwanted commercial messages, and labeled their opponents "anti-commerce radicals". The couple wrote a controversial book entitled How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway.
Within a few years, the focus of spamming (and anti-spam efforts) moved chiefly to email, where it remains today. Arguably, the aggressive email spamming by a number of high-profile spammers such as Sanford Wallace of Cyber Promotions in the mid-to-late 1990s contributed to making spam predominantly an email phenomenon in the public mind. By 1999, Khan C. Smith, a well known hacker at the time, had begun to commercialize the bulk email industry and rallied thousands into the business by building more friendly bulk email software and providing internet access illegally hacked from major ISPs such as Earthlink and Botnets.
By 2009, the majority of spam sent around the World was in the English language; spammers began using automatic translation services to send spam in other languages
Spamming Exists in Different
Forms
Including
- Instant Messaging
- Newsgroup and Forum
- Mobile Phone
- Social Networking Spam
- Social Spam
- Online Game Messaging
- Spam Targeting Search Engines (Spamdexing)
- Blog, Wiki and Guestbook
- Spam Targeting Video Sharing Sites
- SPIT
- Academic Research
- Mobile Apps
Noncommercial Forms of Spam
E-mail and other
forms of spamming have been used for purposes other than advertisements. Many
early Usenet spams were religious or political. Serdar Argic, for instance,
spammed Usenet with historical revisionist screeds. A number of evangelists
have spammed Usenet and e-mail media with preaching messages. A growing number
of criminals are also using spam to perpetrate various sorts of fraud.
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