Why is spam bad?
What can I do about spam? How do I submit a spam report to the Expedient’s abuse reporting system? Is there a recommended format for submitting an email or news abuse report to the abuse report system? I received this email but it is not even addressed to me! How did I get this? How do spammers get my email address? What about those email messages I get telling me if I want to be removed from some mailing list I never signed up for, I have to reply to their message or send an email to “remove@maillist.com” or something like that? What are full headers? How do I know if I’m seeing the full headers? How do I view the full headers? I was told that “somecompany.com” was blocked from sending mail to Expedient, but I still get spam from them. Why? What do UCE, UBE, MLM, and other acronyms mean? Where can I find more detailed information about ways to fight spam? Why is spam bad? Spam is defined as unsolicited, bulk, electronic mail – it is the Internet equivalent of junk mail. Just about eve
The more times it is there, the more room it takes on each site’s disk, and the more time it takes to get it to all of the sites. It should take just a small bit of room on each site’s disk, and take just a small bit of time to get there. So spam is a lot of waste. Why else is spam bad? The more times it is there, the more times we have to see it. Some folks pay for their news by the note, or by the byte, or by how much time it takes them to get it. Some have to pay for each post in a group they read, and their site does not care if they read the post. So spam is not fair. Why else is spam bad? Spam makes folks mad. They post notes and say that they are mad. Lots and lots of notes. We call these notes “flames.” So spam makes lots and lots of flames. Why is a small spam bad? Some folks think that if a small thing is not bad, then the same thing big is not bad too. So if a small spam is not yelled at, then there will be lots and lots of big spams. What did you do? You sent the same thing
Spam is bad for a number of reasons. It’s annoying, it wastes time, it misuses resources, it’s an invasion of privacy, it costs internet users money, it’s annoying (worth repeating). Email Spamming costs its victims much more than it costs its senders. In order to initiate a spam message and vicitmize thousands (or millions) of internet users, a spammer simply requires a connection to the internet and a mail server from which to launch their assault. There are no further advertising fees and no additional costs to the spammer. The vicitms of spam pay much more than the spammers themselves who receive a “free ride.” For the end recipients of spam, their time, patience, and resources are wasted dealing with unsolicited email advertisements. Any recipient with measured phone service (paying by time online), is being directly charged for the amount of time they spend receiving, reading, and processing their emails. Thus, their time spent dealing with spam has an easily quantifiable monetar
Q. Why do we get soooo upset when we receive E-mail which was not requested? There are several reasons: • The free ride. E-mail spam is unique in that the receiver pays so much more for it than the sender does. For example, AOL has said that they were receiving 1.8 million spams from Cyber Promotions per day until they got a court injunction to stop it. Assuming that it takes the typical AOL user only 10 seconds to identify and discard a message, that’s still 5,000 hours per day of connect time per day spent discarding their spam, just on AOL. By contrast, the spammer probably has a T1 line that costs him about $100/day. No other kind of advertising costs the advertiser so little, and the recipient so much. The closest analogy I can think of would be auto-dialing junk phone calls to cellular users (in the US, cell phone users pay to receive as well as originate calls); you can imagine how favorably that might be received. • The “oceans of spam” problem. Many spam messages say “pleas
