Spam

Spam

Although the availability of your private information might be troubling, the consequence for most users is something called spam.

Spam is Internet "junk mail." After all, your e-mail address is often included in the personal information that companies collect and share.

The correct term for spam is unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE). Almost all spam is commercial advertising.

According to reports filed with Congress in early 2004, about two-thirds of all e-mail traffic was spam messages. In the United States, nearly 80 percent of all e-mail was spam.

You might think that the answer to spam e-mail is simple: just delete the messages when they arrive.

But for many computer users, spam is much too big a problem for such a simple solution. Some people receive dozens, even hundreds, of spam messages daily. The problem is huge for businesses, where corporate e-mail

Servers needlessly store and transfer countless spam messages each month. At the personal level, spam recipients spend time reviewing unwanted messages, in fear they may accidentally delete legitimate mail.

This alone costs untold hours of wasted time. The real solution to spam, therefore, is to control it before it reaches all the people who don't want it.

Defining spam is important to controlling it. One person's important message, after all, is another person's spam. This difference makes it hard to establish a legal basis for prevention.

Since 2003, the legally accepted definition of the characteristics of spam is commercial e-mail, bulk transmitted to millions of people at a time.

The volume and the fact that each message contains substantially the same content define spam.

People who send out these endless streams of spam get e-mail addresses in three ways:

» Purchasing lists of e-mail addresses through brokers.

» "Harvesting" e-mail addresses from the Internet.

» Generating random strings of characters in an attempt to match legitimate addresses.