Spam

Spam

Spam is any mass sending of unsolicited electronic messages which creates annoyance, disruption, deceit, or any otherwise harm to the recipient. Email is the most commonly recognized venue of spam, but other media such as chat rooms, blogs, online forums, mobile phone messaging, wiki sites, video-hosting websites, and social networks are susceptible to spam.

The word spam is derived from Spam (uppercase), the name of the canned precooked meat product made by the Hormel Foods Corporation, which was used in a popular 1970 Monty Python sketch in which a restaurant's menu has Spam in nearly every selection and in which the script repeats the word "Spam" liberally. The consequent annoyance caused by this repetition in one character who dislikes Spam thus semantically mimics the annoyance electronic spam causes to recipients.

Overview

Due to the low cost and ease with which electronic messages can be sent, spam is one of the most ubiquitous problems in information and communication technologies. Spam is economically unique in that the receiver pays so much more than the sender does. The vast majority of spam is sent by networks of virus-infected computers, known as botnets, and therefore does not heavily cost the "sender." Statistical studies estimate that around 200 billion spam messages are sent per day and that 97% of all email messages are unwanted.

From a perspective of cost-benefit analysis, spamming occurs because of the low cost of sending mass messages versus the high potential benefit of receiving sales or even just marketing from those messages. One study of a botnet producing pharmaceutical spam, the most frequent type of spam , estimated that 3.5 million U.S. dollars of revenue could be generated per year, with the cost of distribution being relatively low and largely involving the labor and maintenance of botnet software . Anecdotally, the mass presence of spam alone suggests it is profitable, as if it were not profitable it would likely cease to exist.

Ethical Implications

Spamming has many negative effects upon targets and is generally recognized as wrong or bad.