An email box folder of spam messages.

Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail 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, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet forum spam and junk fax transmissions.^{[citation needed]} Look up spam, SPAM in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Image File history File links Download high resolution version (848x469, 84 KB)This screenshot shows a part of kmail. ... Image File history File links Download high resolution version (848x469, 84 KB)This screenshot shows a part of kmail. ... E-mail spam, also known as bulk e-mail or junk e-mail is a subset of spam that involves sending nearly identical messages to numerous recipients by e-mail. ... Messaging spam, sometimes called SPIM, is a type of spam targeting users of instant messaging services. ... Newsgroup spam is a type of spamming where the targets are Usenet newsgroups. ... Spamdexing or search engine spamming is the practice of deliberately creating web pages which will be indexed by search engines in order to increase the chance of a website or page being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page... Spam in blogs (also called simply blog spam or comment spam) is a form of spamdexing. ... Link spam (also called blog spam or comment spam) is a form of spamming or spamdexing that recently became publicized most often when targeting weblogs (or blogs), but also affects wikis (where it is often called wikispam), guestbooks, and online discussion boards. ... Mobile phone spam is a form of spamming directed at the text messaging service of a mobile phone. ... A typical Internet forum discussion, with common elements such as quotes and spoiler brackets A page from a forum showcasing emoticons and Internet slang An Internet forum is a web application for holding discussions and posting user generated content. ... Junk faxes are unsolicited advertising via fax transmission. ...

Spamming is economically viable because advertisers have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists, 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. 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 is widely reviled, and has been the subject of legislation in many jurisdictions.^{[citation needed]} In economics and especially in the theory of competition, barriers to entry are obstacles in the path of a firm which wants to enter a given market. ... “ISP” redirects here. ...

The people that create electronic spam are called spammers.^[1]

Spamming in different media

Instant Messaging and Chat Room spam

Main article: Messaging spam

Instant Messaging spam, sometimes termed spim (a portmanteau of spam and IM, short for instant messenger), makes use of instant messaging systems, such as AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ or Windows Live Messenger. Many IM systems offer a user directory, including demographic information that allows an advertiser to gather the information, sign on to the system, and send unsolicited messages. To send instant messages to millions of users requires scriptable software and the recipients' IM usernames. Spammers have similarly targeted Internet Relay Chat channels, using IRC bots that join channels and bombard them with advertising. Messaging spam, sometimes called SPIM, is a type of spam targeting users of instant messaging services. ... A portmanteau (IPA: ) is a word or morpheme that fuses two or more words or word parts to give a combined or loaded meaning. ... // Instant messaging (IM) is a form of real-time communication between two or more people based on typed text. ... AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) is an advertisement-supported proprietary freeware instant messaging and presence computer program which uses the OSCAR instant messaging protocol and the TOC protocol. ... ICQ is an instant messaging computer program, owned by Time Warners AOL subsidiary. ... For the old versions of this software called MSN Messenger, see MSN Messenger. ... “IRC” redirects here. ... An IRC bot performing a simple task. ...

Messenger service spam has lent itself to spammer use in a particularly circular scheme. In many cases, messenger spammers send messages to vulnerable machines consisting of text like "Annoyed by these messages? Visit this site." The link leads to a Web site where, for a fee, users are told how to disable the Windows messenger service. Though the messenger service is easily disabled for free, the scam works because it creates a perceived need and offers a solution. Often the only "annoying messages" the user receives through Messenger are ads to disable Messenger itself. It is often using a false ID to get money or credit card numbers.

Chat spam

Chat spam can occur in any live chat environment like IRC and in-game multiplayer chat of online games, and in any other form of chat the the masses are able to view. It consists of repeating the same word or sentence many times to get attention or to interfere with normal operations. It is generally considered very rude and may lead to swift exclusion of the user from the used chat service by the owners or moderators. “IRC” redirects here. ...

The application of the name "Spam" to unwanted communication originates in Chat-room spam. Specifically, it was developed in the chat-rooms of People-Link in the early 1980s as a technique for getting rid of unwelcome newcomers. When someone would enter a chat-room full of friends who were in mid-conversation, and when the newcomer tried to turn the conversation in an unwelcome direction, two veteran members of the room would begin typing in the Monty Python “Spam” routine at high speed. They would fill the screen with “Spam Spam Spam eggs Spam Spam and Spam” etc, and make all other communication impossible. The other members of the room would just wait quietly until the newcomer got disgusted and moved on to a different room.

Newsgroup spam and forum spam

Main article: Newsgroup spam

Main article: Forum spam

Newsgroup spam is a type of spamming where the targets are Usenet newsgroups. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ...

Mobile phone spam

Main article: Mobile phone spam

Mobile phone spam is directed at the text messaging service of a mobile phone. This can be especially irritating to customers not only for the inconvenience but also because of the fee they may be charged per text message received in some markets. The term "SpaSMS" was coined at the adnews website Adland in 2000 to describe spam SMS. Mobile phone spam is a form of spamming directed at the text messaging service of a mobile phone. ... SMS arrival notification on a Siemens phone Text messaging, or texting is the common term for the sending of short (160 characters or fewer) text messages, using the Short Message Service, from mobile phones. ...

Online game messaging spam

Many online games allow players to contact each other via player-to-player messaging, chatrooms, or public discussion areas. What qualifies as spam varies from game to game, but usually this term applies to all forms of message flooding, violating the terms of service contract for the website.

In this context, spam is sometimes perceived as a backronym for stupid, pointless, annoying message (sometimes the A is thought to stand for anonymous).^{[citation needed]} A backronym (or bacronym) is a phrase that is constructed after the fact from a previously existing abbreviation, the abbreviation being an initialism or an acronym. ...

Spam targeting search engines (spamdexing)

Main article: Spamdexing

Spamdexing (a portmanteau of spamming and indexing) refers to the practice on the World Wide Web of modifying HTML pages to increase the chances of them being placed high on search engine relevancy lists. These sites use "black hat search engine optimization techniques" to unfairly increase their rank in search engines. Many modern search engines modified their search algorithms to try to exclude web pages utilizing spamdexing tactics. Spamdexing or search engine spamming is the practice of deliberately creating web pages which will be indexed by search engines in order to increase the chance of a website or page being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page... A portmanteau (IPA: ) is a word or morpheme that fuses two or more words or word parts to give a combined or loaded meaning. ... WWWs historical logo designed by Robert Cailliau The World Wide Web (commonly shortened to the Web) is a system of interlinked, hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. ... HTML, short for Hypertext Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for web pages. ... This article is about search engines. ... A typical search results page Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via natural (organic or algorithmic) search results. ...

Blog, wiki, and guestbook spam

Main article: Spam in blogs

Blog spam, or "blam" for short, is spamming on weblogs. In 2003, this type of spam took advantage of the open nature of comments in the blogging software Movable Type by repeatedly placing comments to various blog posts that provided nothing more than a link to the spammer's commercial web site.^[2] Similar attacks are often performed against wikis and guestbooks, both of which accept user contributions. Spam in blogs (also called simply blog spam or comment spam) is a form of spamdexing. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... For the weblog software, see Movable Type. ... Look up Wiki in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Look up guest book in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

Spam targeting video sharing sites

Video sharing sites, such as YouTube, are now being frequently targeted by spammers. The most common technique involves people (or spambots) posting links to sites, most likely pornographic or dealing with online dating, on the comments section of random videos or people's profiles. A video hosting service allows individuals to upload video clips to an Internet website. ... YouTube is a popular video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. ... A spambot is a program designed to collect, or harvest, e-mail addresses from the Internet in order to build mailing lists for sending unsolicited e-mail, also known as spam. ...

Another frequently used technique is using bots to post messages on random users' profiles to a spam account's channel page, along with enticing text and images, usually of a suggestive nature. These pages may include their own or other users' videos, again often suggestive. The main purpose of these accounts is to draw people to their link in the home page section of their profile. Homepage, Home page or Home may refer to: The URL or local file that is automatically loaded when a web browser starts is called homepage or startpage. ...

YouTube has blocked the posting of links but people can still manage to get their message across by replacing all instances of a period with the word "dot." For instance, typing out example dot com instead of example.com bypasses the filter set in place. In addition, YouTube has implemented a CAPTCHA system that makes rapid posting of repeated comments much more difficult than before, due to abuse in the past by mass-spammers who would flood people's profiles with thousands of repetitive comments. Early CAPTCHAs such as these, generated by the EZ-Gimpy program, were used on Yahoo. ...

Another form of such spam is posting a message which claims to elicit an occurrence, such as an easter egg, the loss of a loved one, or being haunted by a ghost, unless a demand is met by copying and pasting the message a certain number of times within a time limit. A prime example is as follows: "Post this in 5 videos in an hour or you shall die." Such posts target the gullible, but those who are more familiar with them usually respond with derision. Some sites include a feature that allows users to mark certain comments as spam or rate unwelcome comments with a low score, with the intent that spam posts will receive a negative rating. A virtual Easter egg is a hidden message or feature in an object such as a movie, book, CD, DVD, computer program, or video game. ...

Yet another kind is actual video spam, giving the uploaded movie a name likely to draw attention, anything currently popular, but the video is totally unrelated, sometimes offensive, and sometimes just a video clip of nothing but the link to the spammer's site they're promoting

Noncommercial 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,^[3] and in some cases have used it to lure people to locations where they have been kidnapped, held for ransom, and even murdered.^[4] Serdar Argic was the alias used in one of the first automated newsgroup spam incidents on Usenet, with the objective of denying the Armenian Genocide. ... Look up evangelist in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Usenet (USEr NETwork) is a global, decentralized, distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name. ...

History

Main article: History of spamming

It is widely believed the term spam is derived from the Monty Python SPAM sketch, set in a cafe where nearly every item on the menu includes SPAM luncheon meat. As the server recites the SPAM-filled menu, a chorus of Viking patrons drowns out all conversations with a song repeating "SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM... lovely SPAM, wonderful SPAM", hence "SPAMming" the dialogue. The excessive amount of SPAM mentioned in the sketch is a reference to British rationing during World War II.^{[citation needed]} SPAM was one of the few meat products that avoided rationing, and hence widely available. // A possible 19th century mass telegraph In the late 19th Century Western Union allowed telegraphic messages on its network to be sent to multiple destinations. ... Monty Python, or The Pythons, is the collective name of the creators of Monty Pythons Flying Circus, a British television comedy sketch show that first aired on the BBC on 5 October 1969. ... This article is about the television comedy skit. ... The Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) regulations in the United States, first enacted by Congress in 1975, exist to regulate and improve the average fuel economy of cars and light trucks (trucks, vans and sport utility vehicles) sold in the US. Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) is the sales weighted... This article is about the canned meat product. ... Viking, also called Norseman or Northman, refers to a member of the Scandinavian seafaring traders, warriors and pirates who raided and colonized wide areas of Europe from the 8th to the 11th century[1] and reached east to Russia and Constantinople, referred to as Varangians by the Byzantine sources and... Combatants Allied powers: China France Great Britain Soviet Union United States and others Axis powers: Germany Italy Japan and others Commanders Chiang Kai-shek Charles de Gaulle Winston Churchill Joseph Stalin Franklin Roosevelt Adolf Hitler Benito Mussolini Hideki Tōjō Casualties Military dead: 17,000,000 Civilian dead: 33,000...

Although the first known instance of unsolicited commercial e-mail occurred in 1978^[5] (unsolicited electronic messaging had already taken place over other media, with the first recorded instance being via telegram on September 13, 1904^{[citation needed]}), the term "spam" for this practice had not yet been applied. In the 1980s the term was adopted to describe certain abusive users who frequented BBSs and MUDs, who would repeat "SPAM" a huge number of times to scroll other users' text off the screen.^[6] In early Chat rooms services like PeopleLink and the early days of AOL, they actually flooded the screen with quotes from the Monty Python Spam sketch. This was used as a tactic by insiders of a group that wanted to drive newcomers out of the room so the usual conversation could continue. It was also used to prevent members of rival groups from chatting -- for instance, Star Wars fans often invaded Star Trek chat rooms, filling the space with blocks of text until the Star Trek fans left.^[7] This act, previously called flooding or trashing, came to be known as spamming.^[8] The term was soon applied to a large amount of text broadcasted by many users. is the 256th day of the year (257th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1904 (MCMIV) was a leap year starting on a Friday (see link for calendar). ... “BBS” redirects here. ... This article is about a type of online computer game. ...

It later came to be used on Usenet to mean excessive multiple posting—the repeated posting of the same message. The unwanted message would appear in many if not all newsgroups, just as SPAM appeared in all the menu items in the Monty Python sketch. The first usage of this sense was by Joel Furr in the aftermath of the ARMM incident of March 31, 1993, in which a piece of experimental software released dozens of recursive messages onto the news.admin.policy newsgroup. This use had also become established—to spam Usenet was flooding newsgroups with junk messages. As a portmanteau of "spew" and "scam", the word was also attributed to the flood of "Make Money Fast" messages that clogged many newsgroups during the 1990s.^{[citation needed]} Usenet (USEr NETwork) is a global, decentralized, distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name. ... Joel Furr, circa 2005 Joel Jay K. Furr (born September 20, 1967 in Roanoke, Virginia) was a Usenet personality in the early and mid 1990s, immortalized in the newsgroups alt. ... Automated Retroactive Minimal Moderation (ARMM) was a program developed in 1993 by Richard Depew to aid in the control of Usenet abuse. ... is the 90th day of the year (91st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1993 (MCMXCIII) was a common year starting on Friday (link will display full 1993 Gregorian calendar). ... A portmanteau (IPA: ) is a word or morpheme that fuses two or more words or word parts to give a combined or loaded meaning. ...

Commercial spamming started in force on March 5, 1994, when a pair 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. The two went on to widely promote spamming of both Usenet and e-mail as a new means of advertisement—over the objections of Internet users they labeled "anti-commerce radicals." Within a few years, the focus of spamming (and antispam efforts) moved chiefly to e-mail, where it remains today.^[9] This article is about the day. ... Year 1994 (MCMXCIV) The year 1994 was designated as the International Year of the Family and the International Year of the Sport and the Olympic Ideal by the United Nations. ... Laurence A. Canter (born June 24, 1953) and Martha S. Siegel (April 9, 1948-2000) were a husband-and-wife firm of lawyers who on April 12, 1994 posted the first massive commercial Usenet spam. ... Usenet (USEr NETwork) is a global, decentralized, distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name. ... Laurence A. Canter (Born 1953) and Martha S. Siegel (1948-2000) were a husband-and-wife firm of lawyers who on March 5, 1994 posted the first massive commercial Usenet spam. ...

There are three popular false etymologies of the word "spam". The first, promulgated by Canter & Siegel themselves, is that "spamming" is what happens when one dumps a can of SPAM luncheon meat into a fan blade. The second is the backronym "shit posing as mail." The third is similar, using "stupid pointless annoying messages."^{[citation needed]} Most suitable seems to be the Esperanto interpretation: The term spamo (with the o-ending designing nouns) makes sense as "senpete alsendita mesaĝo", which means "message being sent to someone without being asked for". A false etymology is an assumed or postulated etymology which is incorrect from the perspective of modern scholarly work in historical linguistics. ... A backronym (or bacronym) is a phrase that is constructed after the fact from a previously existing abbreviation, the abbreviation being an initialism or an acronym. ... This article is about the language. ...

In 1998, the New Oxford Dictionary of English, which had previously only defined "spam" in relation to the trademarked food product, added a second definition to its entry for "spam": "Irrelevant or inappropriate messages sent on the Internet to a large number of newsgroups or users."^[10] The New Oxford Dictionary of English (often abbreviated to NODE) is an English language dictionary first published in 1998 by the Oxford University Press. ...

Hormel Foods Corporation, the makers of SPAM luncheon meat, do not object to the Internet use of the term "spamming". However, they did ask that the capitalized word "SPAM" be reserved to refer to their product and trademark.^[11] By and large, this request is obeyed in forums which discuss spam. In Hormel Foods v SpamArrest, Hormel attempted to assert its trademark rights against SpamArrest, a software company, from using the mark "spam", since Hormel owns the trademark. In a dilution claim, Hormel argued that Spam Arrest's use of the term "spam" had endangered and damaged "substantial goodwill and good reputation" in connection with its trademarked lunch meat and related products. Hormel also asserts that Spam Arrest's name so closely resembles its luncheon meat that the public might become confused, or might think that Hormel endorses Spam Arrest's products. Hormel did not prevail. Attorney Derek Newman responded on behalf of Spam Arrest: "Spam has become ubiquitous throughout the world to describe unsolicited commercial e-mail. No company can claim trademark rights on a generic term." Hormel stated on its website: "Ultimately, we are trying to avoid the day when the consuming public asks, 'Why would Hormel Foods name its product after junk email?'"^[12] Hormel Foods Corporation (NYSE: HRL) is probably best known as the producer of SPAM luncheon meat. ...

Hormel also made two attempts that were dismissed in 2005 to revoke the mark "SPAMBUSTER".^[13]

Hormel's Corporate Attorney Melanie J. Neumann also sent SpamCop's Julian Haight a letter on August 27, 1999 requesting that he delete an objectionable image (a can of Hormel's SPAM luncheon meat product in a trash can), change references to UCE spam to all lower case letters, and confirm his agreement to do so.^[14] SpamCop is a free spam reporting service, allowing recipients of unsolicited bulk email (UBE) and unsolicited commercial email (UCE) to report the offense to the senders Internet Service Provider (ISP), and sometimes their web host. ... is the 239th day of the year (240th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... This article is about the year. ...

Costs of spam

The European Union's Internal Market Commission estimated in 2001 that "junk e-mail" cost Internet users €10 billion per year worldwide. ^[15]

The California legislature found that spam cost United States organizations alone more than $13 billion in 2007, including lost productivity and the additional equipment, software, and manpower needed to combat the problem.^[16]

Spam's direct effects include the consumption of computer and network resources, and the cost in human time and attention of dismissing unwanted messages. In addition, spam has costs stemming from the kinds of spam messages sent, from the ways spammers send them, and from the arms race between spammers and those who try to stop or control spam. In addition, there are the opportunity cost of those who forgo the use of spam-afflicted systems. There are the direct costs, as well as the indirect costs borne by the victims - both those related to the spamming itself, and to other crimes that usually accompany it, such as financial theft, identity theft, data and intellectual property theft, virus and other malware infection, child pornography, fraud, and deceptive marketing. The term arms race in its original usage describes a competition between two or more parties for military supremacy. ... Identity theft is a term first appearing in U.S. literature in the 1990s, leading to the drafting of the Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act. ...

The cost to providers of search engines is not insignificant: This article is about search engines. ...

"The secondary consequence of spamming is that search engine indexes are inundated with useless pages, increasing the cost of each processed query."^[1]

The methods of spammers are likewise costly. Because spamming contravenes the vast majority of ISPs' acceptable-use policies, most spammers have for many years gone to some trouble to conceal the origins of their spam. E-mail, Usenet, and instant-message spam are often sent through insecure proxy servers belonging to unwilling third parties. Spammers frequently use false names, addresses, phone numbers, and other contact information to set up "disposable" accounts at various Internet service providers. In some cases, they have used falsified or stolen credit card numbers to pay for these accounts. This allows them to quickly move from one account to the next as each one is discovered and shut down by the host ISPs. In computer networks, a proxy server is a server (a computer system or an application program) which services the requests of its clients by forwarding requests to other servers. ... Look up credit card in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

The costs of spam also include the collateral costs of the struggle between spammers and the administrators and users of the media threatened by spamming. ^[17]

Many users are bothered by spam because it impinges upon the amount of time they spend reading their e-mail. Many also find the content of spam frequently offensive, in that pornography is one of the most frequently advertised products. Spammers send their spam largely indiscriminately, so pornographic ads may show up in a work place e-mail inbox—or a child's, the latter of which is illegal in many jurisdictions. Recently, there has been a noticeable increase in spam advertising websites that contain child pornography. Porn redirects here. ... Child pornography refers to pornographic material depicting children. ...

Some spammers argue that most of these costs could potentially be alleviated by having spammers reimburse ISPs and individuals for their material.^{[citation needed]} There are two problems with this logic: first, the rate of reimbursement they could credibly budget is not nearly high enough to pay the direct costs; and second, the human cost (lost mail, lost time, and lost opportunities) is basically unrecoverable.

E-mail spam exemplifies a tragedy of the commons: spammers use resources (both physical and human), without bearing the entire cost of those resources. In fact, spammers commonly do not bear the cost at all. This raises the costs for everyone. In some ways spam is even a potential threat to the entire e-mail system, as operated in the past. The Tragedy of the Commons is a type of social trap, often economic, that involves a conflict over resources between individual interests and the common good. ...

Since e-mail is so cheap to send, a tiny number of spammers can saturate the Internet with junk mail. Although only a tiny percentage of their targets are motivated to purchase their products (or fall victim to their scams), the low cost may provide a sufficient conversion rate to keep the spamming alive. Furthermore, even though spam appears not to be economically viable as a way for a reputable company to do business, it suffices for professional spammers to convince a tiny proportion of gullible advertisers that it is viable for those spammers to stay in business. Finally, new spammers go into business every day, and the low costs allow a single spammer to do a lot of harm before finally realizing that the business is not profitable.

Some companies and groups "rank" spammers; spammers who make the news are sometimes referred to by these rankings.^[18][19] The secretive nature of spamming operations makes it difficult to determine how proliferated an individual spammer is, thus making the spammer hard to track, block or avoid. Also, spammers may target different networks to different extents, depending on how successful they are at attacking the target. Thus considerable resources are employed to actually measure the amount of spam generated by a single person or group. For example, victims that use common antispam hardware, software or services provide opportunities for such tracking. Nevertheless, such rankings should be taken with a pinch of salt.

General costs of spam

In all cases listed above, including both commercial and non-commercial, "spam happens" due to a positive Cost-benefit analysis result. Cost-benefit analysis is an important technique for project appraisal: the process of weighing the total expected costs against the total expected benefits of one or more actions in order to choose the best or most profitable option. ...

Cost is the combination of

• Overhead: The costs and overhead of electronic spamming include bandwidth, developing or acquiring an email/wiki/blog spam tool, taking over or acquiring a host/zombie, etc.
• Transaction cost: The incremental cost of contacting each additional recipient once a method of spamming is constructed, multiplied by the number of recipients. (see CAPTCHA as a method of increasing transaction costs)
• Risks: Chance and severity of legal and/or public reactions, including damages and punitive damages
• Damage: Impact on the community and/or communication channels being spammed (see Newsgroup spam)

Benefit is the total expected profit from spam, which may include any combination of the commercial and non-commercial reasons listed above. It is normally linear, based on the incremental benefit of reaching each additional spam recipient, combined with the conversion rate. In economics and related disciplines, a transaction cost is a cost incurred in making an economic exchange. ... Early CAPTCHAs such as these, generated by the EZ-Gimpy program, were used on Yahoo. ... In law, damages refers to the money paid or awarded to a claimant (as it is known in the UK) or plaintiff (in the US) following their successful claim in a civil action. ... Punitive damages are damages awarded to a successful plaintiff in a civil action, over and above the amount of compensatory damages, to: punish the conduct of the civil defendant; deter the civil defendant from committing the invidious act again; and deter others from doing the same thing. ... Newsgroup spam is a type of spamming where the targets are Usenet newsgroups. ... In Internet marketing the conversion rate is the percentage of unique visitors who take a desired action upon visiting the website. ...

Spam is prevalent on the Internet because the transaction cost of electronic communications is radically less than any alternate form of communication, far outweighing the current potential losses, as seen by the amount of spam currently in existence. Spam continues to spread to new forms of electronic communication as the gain (number of potential recipients) increases to levels where the cost/benefit becomes positive. Spam has most recently evolved to include wikispam and blogspam as the levels of readership increase to levels where the overhead is no longer the dominating factor. According to the above analysis, spam levels will continue to increase until the cost/benefit analysis is balanced ^{[citation needed]}.

In Crime

Spam can be used to spread computer viruses, trojan horses or other malicious software. The objective may be identity theft, or worse (eg. advance fee fraud). Some spam attempts to capitalise on human greed whilst other attempts to use the victims inexperience with computer technology to trick them (eg. Phishing, Vishing). A computer virus is a computer program that can copy itself and infect a computer without permission or knowledge of the user. ... In the context of computer software, a Trojan horse is a program that installs malicious software while under the guise of doing something else. ... Identity theft is a term first appearing in U.S. literature in the 1990s, leading to the drafting of the Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act. ... An advance fee fraud is a confidence trick in which the target is persuaded to advance relatively small sums of money in the hope of realizing a much larger gain. ... An example of a phishing email, disguised as an official email from a (fictional) bank. ... There are very few or no other articles that link to this one. ...

On May 31st, 2007, one of the world's most prolific spammers, 27-year-old Robert Alan Soloway, was arrested by federal authorities. Described as one of the top 10 spammers in the world, Soloway is charged with 35-counts, including mail fraud, wire fraud, e-mail fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering. Prosecutors allege that Soloway used millions of "zombie" computers to distribute millions of spam e-mails in 2003. The computers are called "zombies" because their owners are not aware that they are being used for malicious activity. This is the first case in which federal prosecutors used identity theft laws to prosecute a spammer for taking over someone else’s internet domain name.[1] A zombie computer (often abbreviated zombie) is a computer attached to the Internet that has been compromised by a security cracker, a computer virus, or a trojan horse. ...

Political issues

Spamming remains a hot discussion topic. In 2004, the seized Porsche of an indicted spammer was advertised on the Internet;[2] this revealed the extent of the financial rewards available to those who are willing to commit duplicitous acts online. However, some of the possible means used to stop spamming may lead to other side effects, such as increased government control over the Internet, loss of privacy, barriers to free expression, and the commercialization of e-mail.^{[citation needed]} Image File history File links Unbalanced_scales. ... This article is about the auto company. ...

One of the chief values favored by many long-time Internet users and experts, as well as by many members of the public, is the free exchange of ideas. Many have valued the relative anarchy of the Internet, and bridle at the idea of restrictions placed upon it.^{[citation needed]} A common refrain from spam-fighters is that spamming itself abridges the historical freedom of the Internet, by attempting to force users to carry the costs of material which they would not choose.^{[citation needed]} In the realist theory of International Relations, the anarchical system that all states find themselves in is the lack of clear organisation of states into a hieracical order that is found within states. ...

An ongoing concern expressed by parties such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU has to do with so-called "stealth blocking", a term for ISPs employing aggressive spam blocking without their users' knowledge. These groups' concern is that ISPs or technicians seeking to reduce spam-related costs may select tools which (either through error or design) also block non-spam e-mail from sites seen as "spam-friendly". SPEWS is a common target of these criticisms. Few object to the existence of these tools; it is their use in filtering the mail of users who are not informed of their use which draws fire.^{[citation needed]} EFF Logo The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an international non-profit advocacy and legal organization based in the United States with the stated purpose of being dedicated to preserving free speech rights such as those protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution in the context of... The American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU, is a non_governmental organization devoted to defending civil rights and civil liberties in the United States. ... The Spam Prevention Early Warning System (SPEWS) is an anonymous service which maintains a list of IP address ranges belonging to Internet service providers which host spammers. ...

Some see spam-blocking tools as a threat to free expression—and laws against spamming as an untoward precedent for regulation or taxation of e-mail and the Internet at large. Even though it is possible in some jurisdictions to treat some spam as unlawful merely by applying existing laws against trespass and conversion, some laws specifically targeting spam have been proposed. In 2004, United States passed the Can Spam Act of 2003 which provided ISPs with tools to combat spam. This act allowed Yahoo! to successfully sue Eric Head, reportedly one of the biggest spammers in the world, who settled the lawsuit for several thousand U.S. dollars in June 2004. But the law is criticized by many for not being effective enough. Indeed, the law was supported by some spammers and organizations which support spamming, and opposed by many in the antispam community. Examples of effective anti-abuse laws that respect free speech rights include those in the U.S. against unsolicited faxes and phone calls, and those in Australia and a few U.S. states against spam.^{[citation needed]} “Unlawful entry” redirects here. ... In law, conversion is an intentional tort to personal property (same as chattel), where defendants unjustified willful interference with the chattel deprives plaintiff of possession of such chattel. ... The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, signed into law by President Bush on December 16, 2003, establishes the first national standards for the sending of commercial e-mail and requires the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to enforce its provisions. ... “Yahoo” redirects here. ...

In November 2004, Lycos Europe released a screensaver called make LOVE not SPAM which made Distributed Denial of Service attacks on the spammers themselves. It met with a large amount of controversy and the initiative ended in December 2004.^{[citation needed]} The neutrality of this article is disputed. ... Make love not spam logo make LOVE not SPAM was an initiative by Lycos Europe to get people to download a screensaver which endlessly requests data from sites that sell the goods and services mentioned in spam e-mails. ... A denial-of-service attack (also, DoS attack) is an attack on a computer system or network that causes a loss of service to users, typically the loss of network connectivity and services by consuming the bandwidth of the victim network or overloading the computational resources of the victim system. ...

Court cases

United States

Attorney Laurence Canter was disbarred by the Tennessee Supreme Court in 1997 for sending prodigious amounts of spam advertising his immigration law practice. Laurence A. Canter (Born 1953) and Martha S. Siegel (1948-2000) were a husband-and-wife firm of lawyers who on March 5, 1994 posted the first massive commercial Usenet spam. ... The Tennessee Supreme Court is the highest appellate court of the State of Tennessee. ... Nationality law is the branch of a countrys legal system wherein legislation, custom and court precendent combine to define the ways in which that countrys nationality and citizenship are transmitted, acquired or lost. ...

Robert Soloway lost a case in a federal court against the operator of a small Oklahoma-based Internet service provider who accused him of spamming. U.S. Judge Ralph G. Thompson granted a motion by plaintiff Robert Braver for a default judgment and permanent injunction against him. The judgment includes a statutory damages award of $10,075,000 under Oklahoma law.^[20] Default judgment is a binding judgment in favor of the plaintiff when the defendant has not responded to a summons or has failed to appear before a court. ... Look up Injunction in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

In 2005, Jason Smathers, a former America Online employee, pled guilty to charges of violating the CAN-SPAM Act. In 2003, he sold a list of approximately 93 million AOL subscriber e-mail addresses to Sean Dunaway who, in turn, sold the list to spammers.^[21][22] Year 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday (link displays full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... Jason Smathers is a former employee of America Online. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article may require cleanup. ... The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (15 U.S.C. 7701, et seq. ... Year 2003 (MMIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

In June 2007, two men were convicted of eight counts stemming from sending millions of e-mail spam messages that included hardcore pornographic images. Jeffrey A. Kilbride, 41, of Venice, California was sentenced to six years in prison, and James R. Schaffer, 41, of Paradise Valley, Arizona, was sentenced to 63 months. In addition, the two were fined $100,000, ordered to pay $77,500 in restitution to AOL, and ordered to forfeit more than $1.1 million, the amount of illegal proceeds from their spamming operation.^[23] The charges included conspiracy, fraud, money laundering, and transportation of obscene materials. The trial, which began on June 5, was the first to include charges under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, according to a release from the Department of Justice. The specific law that prosecutors used under the CAN-Spam Act was designed to crack down on the transmission of pornography in spam. ^[24] June 2007 is the sixth month of that year. ... Venice Beach and Boardwalk Venice, California, is a district of the city of Los Angeles, California. ... Paradise Valley is a town in Maricopa County, Arizona, USA. According to 2005 Census Bureau estimates, the population of the city is 14,558. ... For other uses, see AOL (disambiguation). ... In the criminal law, a conspiracy is an agreement between natural persons to break the law at some time in the future, and, in some cases, with at least one overt act in furtherance of that agreement. ... Money laundering is the practice of engaging in financial transactions in order to conceal the identity, source and destination of the money in question. ... The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (15 U.S.C. 7701, et seq. ... The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) is a Cabinet department in the United States government designed to enforce the law and defend the interests of the United States according to the law and to ensure fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans. ...

United Kingdom

In the first successful case of its kind, Nigel Roberts from the Channel Islands won £270 against Media Logistics UK who sent junk e-mails to his personal account.^[25] This article is about the British dependencies. ...

January 2007, a Sheriff Court in Scotland awarded Mr. Gordon Dick £1368.66 against Transcom Internet Services Ltd.^[26] for breaching anti-spam laws.^[27] It is the largest amount awarded in compensation in the United Kingdom since the Nigel Roberts case in 2005 above.

References

An advance fee fraud is a confidence trick in which the target is persuaded to advance relatively small sums of money in the hope of realizing a much larger gain. ... Year 2004 (MMIV) was a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... is the 365th day of the year (366th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1990 (MCMXC) was a common year starting on Monday (link displays the 1990 Gregorian calendar). ... is the 269th day of the year (270th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2003 (MMIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... March 10 is the 69th day of the year (70th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday (link displays full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... is the 53rd day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... is the 35th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... The Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building in Washington, D.C. “Justice Department” redirects here. ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era in the 21st century. ... is the 298th day of the year (299th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday (link displays full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... December 27 is the 361st day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (362nd in leap years). ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era in the 21st century. ... is the 218th day of the year (219th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... For other uses, see New Yorker. ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era in the 21st century. ... is the 214th day of the year (215th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ...

Newsgroups

• news.admin.net-abuse.email
• others in news.admin.net-abuse.* hierarchy
• alt.spam

news. ...

See also

• Address munging
• Bacon (electronic)
• E-mail fraud
• Identity theft
• Image spam
• Internet Troll
• Job Scams
• Junk mail
• Make money fast
• Network Abuse Clearinghouse
• Nigerian spam
• Phishing
• Social networking spam
• SORBS
• Spam
• SpamCop
• Spamigation
• Spam Lit
• Spoetry
• Virus (computer)
• Vishing

Address munging is the practice of disguising, or munging, an e-mail address to prevent it being automatically collected and used as a target for people and organizations who send unsolicited bulk e-mail. ... This article is being considered for deletion in accordance with Wikipedias deletion policy. ... Fraud has existed perhaps as long or longer than money. ... Identity theft is a term first appearing in U.S. literature in the 1990s, leading to the drafting of the Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act. ... Image Spam is a kind of spamming which often appears on websites as various image popups on the computer screen, (or by email) often by hackers or Spyware. ... A Do not feed the troll image In Internet terminology, a troll is someone who comes into an established community such as an online discussion forum, and posts inflammatory, rude, repetitive or offensive messages designed intentionally to annoy or antagonize the existing members or disrupt the flow of discussion, including... Category: ... Categories: Stub | Direct marketing | Promotion and marketing communications | Marketing ... Make money fast is a title of an electronically forwarded chain letter which became so infamous that the term is now used to describe all sorts of chain letters forwarded over the Internet, by e-mail spam or Usenet newsgroups. ... The Network Abuse Clearinghouse assembles data on what its sponsors see as misuse of the Internet. ... An advance fee fraud is a confidence trick in which the target is persuaded to advance relatively small sums of money in the hope of realizing a much larger gain. ... An example of a phishing email, disguised as an official email from a (fictional) bank. ... This article or section is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. ... The Sorbs are a Slavic minority indigenous to the region known as Lusatia in the current German states of Saxony and Brandenburg (in former GDR territory). ... Look up spam, SPAM in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... SpamCop is a free spam reporting service, allowing recipients of unsolicited bulk email (UBE) and unsolicited commercial email (UCE) to report the offense to the senders Internet Service Provider (ISP), and sometimes their web host. ... Spamigation is mass litigation conducted to intimidate large numbers of people. ... Spam Lit (also known as Lit Spam and Literary Spam) is defined as snippets of nonsensical verse and prose embedded in spam e-mail messages. ... Spoetry or Spoems are poetic verses made primarily from the subject lines of spam e-mail messages. ... In computer security technology, a virus is a self-replicating program that spreads by inserting copies of itself into other executable code or documents (for a complete definition: see below). ... There are very few or no other articles that link to this one. ...

External links

• Spamtrackers SpamWiki: a peer-reviewed spam information and analysis resource.
• Federal Trade Commission page advising people to forward spam e-mail to them
• Slamming Spamming Resource on Spam
• Why am I getting all this spam? CDT
• Cybertelecom :: Federal SPAM law and policy

• How spam is done by marketers, including the "squeeze page"