Spam Is Now Dead Meat

By: J Schipper

Other than the canned meat sold by Hormel, the term spam is used
to describe unsolicited bulk email. It is rumored that the term
Spam came from an old Monty Python comedy sketch about a
restaurant where every item on the menu came with an order of
Spam. Certainly this is an accurate comparison due to the
ubiquitous nature of junk email, which first started to appear
in bulk in the early 1990s. The usual definition of spam is
email that is unsolicited, without prior permission or business
relationship, transmitted in mass mailings and containing
commercial content.

As the Internet became used increasingly in homes and
businesses, marketers did their best to promote their wares
through this new medium. Email, unlike postal mail that requires
a separate postage charge, can be sent out in bulk just as
cheaply as it can be sent to one person. Therefor, bulk email
became an irresistible way to advertise for Internet-based
marketers. Their only difficulty was to find valid email
addresses for recipients.

Bulk marketers began to compile lists of known email addresses
and sell them to other advertisers. Consumers often sign up on
mailing lists to be notified of sales or product promotions,
even from companies the openly pass their clients' email
addresses on to other companies. Spammers get email addresses
off publicly available web sites and user groups. Spammers have
even been known to hack into businesses' customer databases to
harvest even more addresses for their lists.

It did not matter if some of the addresses had expired; if an
address is not valid, email is simply not delivered. Millions of
simultaneous email messages could be sent out at little or no
cost to the marketer, so customer targeting was no longer
necessary. Spam was lucrative for marketers, as any response
rate at all would bring in profit from this essentially free
advertising. Much of the spam advertised goods and services of
dubious quality, such as pornography, get-rich-quick schemes,
multilevel marketing, stock promotions, quack health remedies,
and of course the services of internet marketers offering to
send out even more spam on behalf of the email account holder.

Internet users, however, were less pleased with spam than were
internet merchants. Many consumers resented receiving
advertisements through what is to be considered a personal
electronic mailbox. Finding legitimate emails became a time
consuming process of sifting through hundreds of unwanted
messages. Furthermore, some of the spam contained viruses.
Constant flow of spam used up bandwidth and filled up server
space. Parents objected to pornographic pictures being sent to
family websites which were accessed by children.

Spam is costly to the business world. It takes up bandwidth and
server storage space. Legitimate email may be lost, inboxes fill
up and staff spend office time deleting unwanted email. A study
published in May 2004 by Radicati Group shows that large
businesses (with approximately 10,000 employees) which do not
use spam filters lose $2,923.20 per user per year or a total of
$30 million annually in terms of email productivity. As Bill
Gates said, "The torrent of unwanted, unsolicited, often
offensive and sometimes fraudulent email is eroding trust in
technology, costing business billions of dollars a year, and
decreasing our collective ability to realize technology's full
potential."

Aside from being an annoying, time-wasting nuisance, spam also
includes "phishing" emails, false requests purportedly from
companies such as Ebay or Paypal, asking for credit card
information.

The total savings for businesses which do install anti-spam
filters is approximately $19.9 million per year. (Claburn,
2004). Filtering software looks for tell-tale signs such as an
invalid or spoofed "From" address, invalid host name in the
"From" or "To" address, similarity to previous emails, direct
SMTP transmission from a host without a fixed IP address,
receipt of the email from an unrestricted mail server, an IP
address, netblock or domain matching that of a known spammer or
"spamhaus", and unique headers created by spamming software.

No matter what kind of anti-spam system you employ in your home
or office, from the most basic to the most thorough, it's bound
to save you time and money.

About the author:
J Schipper loves Spam
Blockers Accounting
Software Business
Software Disk
Recovery