Spam-What is it?

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Unsolicited Commercial Email: Why is it called "Spam?"

That pile of advertisements that clutters your email inbox can be called a lot of things, but most commonly it's dubbed spam. Technically, these ads are unsolicited commercial emails (UCEs) but no one can argue that the slang term spam rolls off the tongue much easier.

Though the term spam was applied first to newsgroup postings that were off-subject or posted too frequently, the term is best known for it's representation of junk email. Since the mid-1990s, unsolicited email earned the nickname spam because of the uncanny resemblance between the way SPAM, a lunchmeat, is received by a restaurant customer in a 1970 Monty Python skit and the way spam email is received by the internet user. (Just to get the terms straight—SPAM written in capital letters is the trademark term for Hormelâs canned lunch meat while spam, in lowercase, is popular slang for UCE.)

In the comedy skit, a waitress repeatedly offers large servings of SPAM as a part of every entree even though one customer doesn't want any. To complicate matters, a gleeful Viking chorus in the corner frequently bursts into song praising SPAM, drowning out the frustrated waitress who canât complete the customerâs order. Similarly, spam email is constantly offered to internet users who donât want unsolicited email. When spam saturates an inbox it seems—like the Viking choirs downing out the waitress—to overwhelm the recipient.

What is Spam?

Like most internet users, I have several e-mail accounts. My oldest, most spam-stalked one is a 4.0 MB account from Yahoo. I receive over 200 e-mails weekly in this account (about 30 a day) totaling between 1.5 to 2.0 MB of space. If I donât clear it out frequently it stockpiles until Yahoo sends me a warning that Iâm over my storage limit, then they politely threaten to block new incoming mail.

But during the past week Iâve let my email stack up so I could have a closer look at it in bulk. By the end of the week, I had 7 legitimate emails in the account and 208 pieces of spam. Most of the spam had been filtered to my spam folder by Yahooâs bulk mail filtering service, but about 10% (20 emails) made it directly to my inbox without my consent.

I took a few minutes to break all of the spam down into categories and see what topics the spammers (senders of spam) addressed the most.

The leading spam topic in my mailbox—financial service ads. These ads included offers for mortgage services, home equity loans, bill consolidation, credit monitoring services and "credit repair" services. There were also several dozen offers for money making methods including work at home offers, surveys in return for payment, work for merchandise schemes, lotteries, contests, and clubs to join that offered some sort of financial or product incentive.

In second place were health ads including diet plans and clubs, health insurance offers, recipe offers, fitness magazine subscriptions, websites to order prescriptions, a variety of health supplements for sale, and, surprise—at least 10 ads for Viagra.

Third were business supplies, in particular printer cartilages, ink refills and business cards.

Offers for other merchandise came in fourth, including electronics, software, music, movies, cosmetics, clothing and art.

Other services (besides financial services) came in fifth. These included long distance phone carriers, insurance services, people-find research sites, real estate services, education offers, job placement claims and auction houses.

Most Despised Spam

These three types take the prize for the most annoying spam clogging my account:

Sporn—spam promoting pornographic web sites and services tops my list. These steamy invitations are often easy to spot, but some of them now come wrapped in sneaky packaging. Check out Sporn—What Is It? to learn about spornersâ latest tricks.

Computer Viruses—I received the "Snow White" virus about a year ago. The name rang a bell as I glanced through the mail in my bulk folder. I scanned the email to see if it was dangerous; my virus detecting software confirmed that "Snow White" carried a virus so I deleted it. I donât know how many other viruses Iâve received and automatically deleted without taking note.

False Friendlies—between 10% and 20% of spam parades through my email account pretending to be from a source I trust. Deceptive spam titles make my "delete" finger quiver with annoyance, like one I received from "DAD" with the subject: "FWD." Many may have been fooled into opening this spam, but since my dad doesnât use email I deleted without guilt. Another spam, titled: "Your new payment schedule" from "Credit Management" was a devious attempt to trick me into believing the message was from a company I had a credit account with. Cheerful "Hello!" emails from "Your old friend," and "Missed your call" from "Bill" are just as deceptive and just as exasperating.

Why is Spam a Problem?

Most of the individual spam I receive is under 5k, but occasionally there will be the 20k whopper (usually diet ads with photos of women in bathing suits who, clearly, no longer need to diet). My last batch of spam (208 pieces) totaled 1.8 M-nearly half my email account storage capacity. Tally all the spam kilobytes from one email account, multiply this by all email accounts in use for every ISP out there and you begin to see the staggering volume of transmission and storage space hogged by spam. Someone has to pay for all that time and storage, and it isn't the spammer. With a tiny investment, a spammer can send over 100,000 bulk emails per hour.

So itâs not just annoying to sift through junk email to find genuine correspondence once you understand that you are being forced to waste your time and space—your personal time spent reviewing email you didnât request to free up space in your mailbox, your internet time spent downloading the spam, and your ISPâs investment in bandwidth transmission capacity, time, and storage space spent getting all that spam to you—a cost you absorb as an ISP customer. Spam is a problem because the cost is forced onto you, the recipient.