Spam
Spam is commonly referred as unsolicited communications sent in bulk over an electronic media such as e-mail, mobile (SMS, MMS) and instant messaging services, usually with the objective of marketing products or services.
In general spam messages tend to fall into the following categories:
- Unsolicited commercial advertising
- Pornography
- Scams or fraud
- Propaganda
- Chain letters
Spam exhibits certain general characteristics:
- Firstly, spam is an electronic message. For most purposes, this may be restricted to email, but other methods of delivering spam do exist, including the Short Messaging Service, or SMS, Voice over IP, mobile phone multimedia messaging services, instant messaging services.
- Secondly, spam is unsolicited. If the recipient has agreed to accept a message, it is not spam. However, how and when such consent is given may not be clear, especially when a pre-existing relationship exists between the sender and recipient.
- Thirdly, spam is sent in bulk. This implies that the sender distributes a large number of essentially identical messages and that recipients are chosen indiscriminately.
These three traits define Unsolicited Bulk E-mail (UBE). If a fourth is added – that spam must be of a commercial nature – the resulting class of messages is referred to as Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (UCE).
International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in 2004 estimated that as much as 80% of all e-mail traffic is spam, compared to 35% in 2003, with spammers sending hundreds of millions of messages per day. The estimated costs of spam to the global economy are approximately US$25 billion dollars per year. The problem is spreading also to cell phones. In Japan, nine out of ten junk e-mails come in the form of mobile telephone text messages. Global Statistics on spam can be accessed here.
In addition to being a nuisance and limit your network access, spam provides a cover for spreading viruses, worms, trojans, spyware, etc., which typically are sent as attachments to e-mail messages, which may cause harm to individual consumers and user organizations, as well as to network operators and service providers.