Spam is an electronic messaging system that is used by individuals, frauds and companies to send e-mails in bulk. It can be used to spread computer viruses like Trojan horses and other software, etc. The most common is e-mail spam whereas there are many other media such as mobile phone messaging spamming, search engine spam, forum spam, social networking spam, etc. It is highly annoying for the recipient of the spam as too many junk e-mails reduce the visibility of important e-mails and hence an important message can be overlooked which might sometimes cost a lot. Mainly advertisers and frauds use e-mail spamming as it does not involve operating costs and it has no/ less barriers to entry. The only thing they have to do is compose a spam e-mail and send it across to innumerable e-mail IDs. The only people who suffer are the recipient of these e-mails.
The reasons why spam is considered to be ‘bad’ are that they are innumerous; they are offensive and fake. Statistics reveal that large ISPs (Internet Service Providers) notice more than 80% spammers. With this huge number of spam e-mails, meaningful and important e-mails are lost. Filtering e-mails are also not so effective now-a-days. Identification of spam messages has become difficult. I will give you a very simple example to explain the impact of spam on people. If suppose a bank is sending thousands of e-mails, mobile phone messages, etc to its customers on a regular basis, the customers will feel annoyed and will stop giving importance to these spam messages. Even if any important message will be sent by the bank, it will be ignored by the customer as he/she might feel that it is a spam. This drawback will then be suffered by both bank and the customer. Hence, sending spam messages will only trouble the recipient and waste the sender’s time.
To identify a real message one must check its sender’s authentication. But usually it’s difficult to trace and compare a fake and an original ID. A 2007 statistical analysis showed that USA contributed around 28.4% for the total number of spam messages sent worldwide. There are many court cases running for the e-mail spamming done by various companies and they have been sent to prison or have given a huge sum of money for settlement of the case. However, there is no end to it. The only way to avoid spam messages is to report abuse and ignore the spam notices and warnings. A highly secured network will also help reduce spam e-mails. Spam still exists and is still difficult to find a solution to it. We can try and make incremental progress and can individually contribute little to reduce the number.
Brian Kingsley - Director of Technical Services
