SPAM

Spam Defined:    According to the Webster dictionary, Spam is defined as Unsolicited e-mail, often of a commercial nature, sent                                    indiscriminately to multiple mailing lists, individuals, or newsgroups; junk e-mail.

                                The most common forms of spam in your In-Box are:
                                        Chain letters;
                                 Pyramid schemes (including Multilevel Marketing, or MLM);
                                         Other "Get Rich Quick" or "Make Money Fast" (MMF) schemes;
                                         Offers of phone sex lines and ads for pornographic Web sites;
                                         Offers of software for collecting e-mail addresses and sending spam;
                                         Offers of bulk e-mailing services for sending spam;
                                         Stock offerings for unknown start-up corporations;
                                         Quack health products and remedies; and
                                         Illegally pirated software


Why is Spam A Problem?
1. Cost to receiver and ISP-  Bulk e-mail is very cheap for the sender but that is NOT true of costs of receiving it. The costs can range from the long-distance             charges or per-minute access charges for dialing into an Internet service provider (ISP) to the cost of connectivity and disk storage space at the ISP and the            administrative costs when the incoming flood uses up capacity, resulting in system outages. These costs can be very high-  one major U.S.-based  ISP estimates         that spam costs it more than $1 million per month, accounting for nearly $3 per user per month. It is much harder, however, to calculate the cost of  opportunities     lost because of system outages, delayed services, and overflowing mailboxes.
    Spam clutters the internet service provider’s bandwidth.  This leads to significantly slower internet access for the user.

2. Invasion of Privacy- An email address should be a private account to an individual. Many of the messages are inappropriate and can easily appear in children’s         e-mail boxes.

3. Fraud- In response to the push to remove Spam from the internet, the spammers (those who send spam) relay their messages off the mail server of a third party.     This underhanded practice creates even more damage, because now both the receiving system and the innocent relay system are flooded with junk email. The         third party site will be the recipient of any complaints about the spam.  Also, the headers of messages are forged, which in turn, makes it seem  as though the             message originated elsewhere again causing complaints to an innocent party.

4. Spam is out of control with an estimated 25 million messages sent daily.

Prevention
It is important to understand how spam originates to help in it's prevention.Spam originates when you give out your email address when visiting a site or chatroom.

• To prevent  spam it is a good idea to use a decoy email adress or a different screen name when entering a chat room.

•  Never respond to spam even to remove from email- it is a ploy to confirm your email address!  Like telemarketers, never give spammers permission to send you information.

• Complain to your email provider or join anti-spam organizations as CAUCE – Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email. 

 

What is the government doing about spam?
Up until January 1, 2004, the government had not been successful in enacting anti-spam laws because it is in violation of the First Amendment. In addition, many spammers originate from off shore so our government laws would have little effect anyway.

The CAN-SPAM Act, went into effect on Jan. 1, 2004 in the US. This law puts specific requirements on senders of commercial email, including providing a valid physical postal address, honoring unsubscribe requests within a specific timeframe. The downside of the law is that it pre-empts stronger state laws and places enforcement in the hands of the FTC, state Attorney's General and ISPs.