Anti Spam

The terms “spam” and “spamming” have developed a negative connotation to mean mass abusive use of electronic communications. Similar complaints have been made of every mode of mass delivery of communication, from door-to-door salespeople to the latest abusers of Internet Telephony.

During the 20th century, with the development of the General Post Office, this has become especially true of all mass postings (regardless of whether they have been for commercial or noncommercial senders), because the receivers of these unsolicited deliveries have often referred to them as mere “junk mail”.

With the advent of electronic communications each development has become used for unsolicited contacts. The telephone system was used for “telemarketing” and broadcast faxes once the facsimile machine became popular.

With the advent of the Internet e-mail, text messaging cellphones, Internet telephony, Instant Messaging, wikis and blogs, each has been abused to reach mass recipients, except that the cost of reaching larger audiences has plummeted to the point that solicitations are being made, even as the odds of a given solicitation’s success approach zero.

The term spam was initially popularly used to refer to such abuse of newsgroups (USENET), but came to primarily refer to e-mail spam as this became the larger problem and ’spam’ became a part of common vocabulary, it has been used to refer to abuse of these other media: junk faxes, spam, sms spam, spit, spim, wikispam, blogspam.

In the past, households posted notices on their gates which stated “no solicitors,” but electronic media generally haven’t been built with the foresight required to provide a place for such a virtual sign to be placed, and they generally aren’t followed in any case. Spammers are criminals in most legal jurisdictions; they often falsely claim that the message was solicited, or hide their identity, or make unsubstantiated or false claims, and at a minimum commit trespass to chattels.

Sending bulk messages to recipients who have not solicited them has come to be known as spamming, and the messages themselves as spam. The etymology of the term is discussed below.

Although spam is merely an extension of mass communications through the ages, some have argued that spam is different because the costs, unlike with traditional methods, are borne disproportionately by the recipient and not by the sender. Spam is analogous to junk fax advertising, which also requires the recipient to carry the brunt of the cost. However, many older forms of advertising have similar cost distributions. For example, with cinema advertising, a ticket has been purchased to see a performance but the ticket holder becomes a paid captive audience for unsolicited advertising. Telephone, radio, and television advertising all require use of the recipient’s own equipment if unsolicited mass marketing is to be achieved.

Regardless of its similarity to all forms of unsolicited mass communication, spamming is now regarded as a social problem. However, a search of statements concerning the development of commercial radio will reveal similar rhetoric by persons such as Herbert Hoover and John Reith as early in the 20th century as 1924.

Original by Wikipedia