Post by kas on Jun 1, 2011 4:21:22 GMT -5
What is Spam?
The word spam is used a lot these days, to describe all manner of unsolicited bulk messages that are sent indiscriminately to electronic messaging systems. While spam was originally associated with email messaging services, the rise of social networking and blogging means that spam can now be found in practically all corners of the Internet. Some of the various media that are abused by spam messaging include instant messaging, usenet, search engines, blogs, wikis, online classifieds, forums, and social networking sites. The term spam is even used sometimes to describe non-Internet services such as television advertising, print classifieds, mobile phones, and junk mail.
Why Does Spam Exist?
The reason why most spam messaging exists is simple - to make spammers money. Spamming is economically viable because of the low cost associated with mailing lists and online messaging services, and while universally hated, there are few legal and financial risks associated with the act of spamming. Even today, the most popular way to spam is via email, due to the ability of spammers to send bulk mail messages in a short amount of time. While email messaging services are betting smarter all the time and developing better spam filters, some spam still manages to get through.
Email spam has been made illegal in many jurisdictions, but a large majority of spamming is outsourced to parts of the world where this is not the case. Email spam is normally automated and sometimes even associated with 'zombie networks', where virus-infected computers are used by spammers to send out their malicious messages. Along with the dedicated spam filters in email programs, a number of other technologies have been developed to help deal with the huge amount of spam being delivered around the world.
Because of the automated nature of most spam, forum and blog developers often check the human identity of anyone who is commenting or posting a message via a CAPTCHA mechanism. Along with spam on email, forums, and blogs, search engines are also increasingly being targeted through spamdexing and 'black hat' search engine optimisation techniques. Spam is a huge problem all over the Internet, and the development of technology to slow down spammers is one of the major challenges faced by modern information service providers.
www.spews.org/spam.html
The word spam is used a lot these days, to describe all manner of unsolicited bulk messages that are sent indiscriminately to electronic messaging systems. While spam was originally associated with email messaging services, the rise of social networking and blogging means that spam can now be found in practically all corners of the Internet. Some of the various media that are abused by spam messaging include instant messaging, usenet, search engines, blogs, wikis, online classifieds, forums, and social networking sites. The term spam is even used sometimes to describe non-Internet services such as television advertising, print classifieds, mobile phones, and junk mail.
Why Does Spam Exist?
The reason why most spam messaging exists is simple - to make spammers money. Spamming is economically viable because of the low cost associated with mailing lists and online messaging services, and while universally hated, there are few legal and financial risks associated with the act of spamming. Even today, the most popular way to spam is via email, due to the ability of spammers to send bulk mail messages in a short amount of time. While email messaging services are betting smarter all the time and developing better spam filters, some spam still manages to get through.
Email spam has been made illegal in many jurisdictions, but a large majority of spamming is outsourced to parts of the world where this is not the case. Email spam is normally automated and sometimes even associated with 'zombie networks', where virus-infected computers are used by spammers to send out their malicious messages. Along with the dedicated spam filters in email programs, a number of other technologies have been developed to help deal with the huge amount of spam being delivered around the world.
Because of the automated nature of most spam, forum and blog developers often check the human identity of anyone who is commenting or posting a message via a CAPTCHA mechanism. Along with spam on email, forums, and blogs, search engines are also increasingly being targeted through spamdexing and 'black hat' search engine optimisation techniques. Spam is a huge problem all over the Internet, and the development of technology to slow down spammers is one of the major challenges faced by modern information service providers.
www.spews.org/spam.html