UBE, UCE, MMF, MLM… What do they all mean?
First, a short lesson on the term “SPAM”. Spam describes a particular kind of Usenet posting, but is now often used to describe many kinds of inappropriate activities, including some email-related events. It is technically incorrect to use “spam” to describe email abuse. ● UBE: Unsolicited Bulk Email Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE) is Email with substantially identical content sent to many recipients who did not ask to receive it. Almost all UBE is also UCE (see next). UBE is undoubtedly the single largest form of email abuse today. There are automated email sending programs that can send millions of messages a day; the bandwidth, storage space, and time consumed by such massive mailing is incredible. One month’s worth of mailings from one of the most nefarious bulk email outfits was estimated at over 134 gigabytes, yes that’s right, gigabytes. Each message was sent over the email wires, consuming bandwidth. Then, each message was either stored locally or “bounced” back to the sender, tak
