Being a spammer and abusing the Internet

Let’s face it, no one likes getting spammed in post, but getting the same amount of spam in your email inbox is even more annoying. Spam is unsolicited emails that you generally receive with the intention of selling you something or generally scamming you out of your hard-earned money.

The other thing about spam is that it is never sent to you manually – there is no guy sitting somewhere sending an email at a time. Nerd. Spam is sent in bulk through software programs that typically send this garbage in batches of about 1 million emails at a time.

It’s bad enough that much of the spam you receive is not very pleasant in terms of its content. No. The worst part is that these criminals don’t even have to pay the cost of a stamp to send you an email. It is quite free for them to do this. Spammers have some costs, but compared to the amount of cash some of these idiots make, the costs are very small.

So why do you hate spam so much? Most people hate the daily chore of having to delete some annoying emails. Or have your antivirus program go off and complain that there’s a Trojan virus hiding in that last piece of spam. That’s enough to deal with it, but when you start getting 100 or 200 spam messages every day, it means that you spend many hours each week fixing this mess.

In the early days of the Internet, before we all used email as much as we do now, spam was mostly limited to USENET groups, newsgroups that were established to discuss specific issues and topics. As that process progressed, people could cross-post or message multiple groups.

Once people started cross-posting, spammers exploited that process. They quickly learned that the same message could be sent to thousands of newsgroups regardless of their interests or topic of discussion. When email began to gain popularity, spammers discovered that it was a completely new way to develop a new audience for the junk products or services they were promoting.

As spam began to increase, we had a new problem: Spambots were born. These are programs that are used to collect emails that will be compiled into lists to send spam to people or very large groups of people.

While most of you are fed up with the amount of spam we get, for the spammer there is a good return on spam sounding in terms of cash. Some emails that you consider spam are actually known as “crazy” advertising. This is advertising directed and sent only to people who appear to have a valid interest in the product or service offered. Usually email addresses are acquired in a “legitimate” way – you filled out a form on a website somewhere.

But most spam is of another nasty kind and while most people won’t fall for the ridiculous merchandise or get-rich-quick scheme promoted in email, there is one person who will provide a credit card number or other information that provides the spammer with a solid reward. In this case, the efforts of spammers pay off.

Although it seems that spammers can get away with it without us having anything to say about it, the reality is that many efforts are being made to combat spam. Government, technology officials, companies and trade groups are forging an alliance to figure out how to fight spam and turn it into something we talk about in the past tense. While the issue may never be 100% resolved, there are now legal tools and procedures that help all of us address this issue.