Let's face facts nobody likes getting junk mail in the post but getting the same amount of spam into your e-mail inbox is even more annoying. Spam is unsolicited e-mails that you receive usually with the intent of selling you something or generally trying to con you out of your hard earned cash.
The other thing about spam is that it's never sent to you manually - there isn't some guy sitting somewhere sending out one e-mail at a time. No no. Spam is sent in bulk by software programs that usually send this crap out in batches of about 1 million e-mails at each go.
It's bad enough that a lot of the spam you get is either not very nice in terms of it's content. No. What's worse is that these crooks don't even have to pay the cost of a stamp to send you e-mail. It's pretty much free for them to do this. Spammers do run into some costs but compared to the amount of cash some of these idiots make the costs are very small.
So why do you hate spam so much? Most people hate the daily chore of having to delete a few annoying e-mails. Or having their anti-virus program kick in and complain that there's a trojan virus hiding in that last piece of spam. That's enough to be dealing with but when you start receiving 100 or 200 pieces of spam each day it means that you're spending a lot of hours every single week tidying up this mess.
In the early days of the Internet, before we all used e-mail as much as we do now, spam was mostly limited to USENET groups, newsgroups that were established to discuss specific issues and topics. As that process advanced, it became possible for people to cross post, or send one message across multiple groups.
Once people began cross posting, that process was exploited by spammers. They quickly learned that you could send the same message to thousands of newsgroups regardless of their interests or the topic of discussion. When e-mail began to rise in popularity, spammers discovered that this was a whole new way to develop a new audience for whatever junk products or services they were promoting.
As spam began to increase we had a new problem - spambots were born. These are programs that are used to harvest e-mails that will be compiled into lists in order to spam individuals or very large groups of people.
While most of you are sick of amount of spam we get, for the spammer there is a good return on the spam they sound out in terms of cash. Some e-mail that you consider to be spam is really known as 'shotgun' advertising. This is advertising that is targeted and sent only to people who seem to have a valid interest in the product or service offered. Usually the e-mail addresses are acquired in a "legitimate" way - you filled out a form on a website somewhere.
But most spam is of the other nasty kind and while most people won't fall for the ridiculous merchandise or get-rich-quick scheme that are promoted in e-mail, there is that one person who will provide a credit card number or other information that provides the spammer with a solid payoff. In this case the spammers efforts are rewarded.
Although it seems like the spammers can get away with a lot without us having any say in the matter, the reality is there are many efforts being made to combat spam. Government, technology officials, companies and trade groups are forging an alliance to figure out how to combat spam and make it something that we talk about in the past tense. While the problem might never be solved 100% there are now tools and legal procedures in place which are helping us all to tackle this problem.
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