The Dreaded Issue Of Spam
- Date: 2010-06-13 - Word Count: 516
Share This!
All about Spam
Spam is the scourge of the Internet. Spam, as everyone knows, is the unsolicited advertisements that clog up email inboxes worldwide. Even occasional users of the Internet will know how annoying and time consuming spam can be - when logging onto the Internet to quickly check your email becomes a time consuming process of sorting through offers of romantic encounters and get rich schemes.
The First Spam
An immigration law firm in Arizona is popularly described as sending the first intentional, mass commercial email firm in Arizona advertising their services over Usenet in 1994. This event is commonly referred to as the 'Green Card spam'. Since then, the movement of spam over the Internet has exploded.
Why Spam is So Bad
One government study even put the cost of spam to organizations in the United States at $10 billion a year and growing! This number is so high because the cost is not just in lost productivity; money has to be spent to buy more hardware to deal with the influx of email messages, and software and staff assigned specifically to deal with spam. It is clear now that spam accounts for the majority of Internet traffic. Studies have estimated that there are 55 billion spam emails sent every day worldwide - this accounts for 80 to 85 per cent of all income email!
Spam makes our lives harder. Instead of being able to quickly respond to emails and get on with
other more important tasks, Spam makes us waste our time sorting through our inbox to differentiate emails from friends and colleagues from badly worded emails trying to sell us the latest fad medicines. While spam may not seem that bad for you, keep in mind that your ISP tries to block most of the spam that is sent your way before it gets a chance to make it into your inbox (which in turn leads to higher ISP costs).
Making Money With Spam
As horrible as spam is, it must be profitable, or else it would not be so prevalent. Although you would never respond to spam, because it is so cheap to send massive amounts of spam, a very low percentage of recipients have to respond for the advertiser to make money. As opposed to direct mailings, which can costs cents per letter, spam costs a fraction of a fraction of a cent per message. Because it is so cheap to send out, you can send out extremely high volumes of advertisements and only require a very small number of recipients to respond.
A World Without Spam
Never responding to offers in spam is the most obvious way to deal with the problem; if there isn't a market, then no one will bother to send spam. However, as discussed above, because only a small percentage of people need to respons to spam for it to be profitable, this method will never reasonable deal with the issue of spam. In the absence of any strong regulatory programs by the government, Internet users are left trying to find the best filtering software they can to try to stop the spam before it reaches their inboxes.
Spam is the scourge of the Internet. Spam, as everyone knows, is the unsolicited advertisements that clog up email inboxes worldwide. Even occasional users of the Internet will know how annoying and time consuming spam can be - when logging onto the Internet to quickly check your email becomes a time consuming process of sorting through offers of romantic encounters and get rich schemes.
The First Spam
An immigration law firm in Arizona is popularly described as sending the first intentional, mass commercial email firm in Arizona advertising their services over Usenet in 1994. This event is commonly referred to as the 'Green Card spam'. Since then, the movement of spam over the Internet has exploded.
Why Spam is So Bad
One government study even put the cost of spam to organizations in the United States at $10 billion a year and growing! This number is so high because the cost is not just in lost productivity; money has to be spent to buy more hardware to deal with the influx of email messages, and software and staff assigned specifically to deal with spam. It is clear now that spam accounts for the majority of Internet traffic. Studies have estimated that there are 55 billion spam emails sent every day worldwide - this accounts for 80 to 85 per cent of all income email!
Spam makes our lives harder. Instead of being able to quickly respond to emails and get on with
other more important tasks, Spam makes us waste our time sorting through our inbox to differentiate emails from friends and colleagues from badly worded emails trying to sell us the latest fad medicines. While spam may not seem that bad for you, keep in mind that your ISP tries to block most of the spam that is sent your way before it gets a chance to make it into your inbox (which in turn leads to higher ISP costs).
Making Money With Spam
As horrible as spam is, it must be profitable, or else it would not be so prevalent. Although you would never respond to spam, because it is so cheap to send massive amounts of spam, a very low percentage of recipients have to respond for the advertiser to make money. As opposed to direct mailings, which can costs cents per letter, spam costs a fraction of a fraction of a cent per message. Because it is so cheap to send out, you can send out extremely high volumes of advertisements and only require a very small number of recipients to respond.
A World Without Spam
Never responding to offers in spam is the most obvious way to deal with the problem; if there isn't a market, then no one will bother to send spam. However, as discussed above, because only a small percentage of people need to respons to spam for it to be profitable, this method will never reasonable deal with the issue of spam. In the absence of any strong regulatory programs by the government, Internet users are left trying to find the best filtering software they can to try to stop the spam before it reaches their inboxes.
Related Tags: software, technology, seo, computer, internet, website, online, science, search engine, hardware
Your Article Search Directory : Find in Articles
Recent articles in this category:
- How An Email Spam Blocker Will Save You Time And Effort
Electronic mail is a fantastic innovation, but for millions of people it has become something very i - Most Spam Comes From Us, Romania And Brazil
At the end of the first quarter of 2009, Romania was placed in the top three sources of spam, with a - Affiliate Fraud- Is It Worth It?
If you're into affiliate marketing it is important to know what affiliate fraud is.Affiliate fraud h - Your Home Computer Will be Safe and Secured if You Follow These Steps
As a home computer user, you need to make sure that your computer is safe from any form of maliciou - Spam Mail
Spam Mail: An overviewHow Does A Spam Mail Overflow Initiates?Each day more and more neophytes to th - Spams and Their Filtering Techniques
We are all familiar with word Spam. This is something we encounter almost on a daily basis in our m - Anti-Spam Software: The Importance Of Anti-Spam Software
You may have have found yourself in the following position. You open your email program, get up to - Anti Spam filtering: Do You Use Anti Spam Filtering?
Spam email can be stopped or controlled by using a spam filter. Email filtering software can be ins - Nigerian Scams-they're Still Around
It's not easy to make money on the Internet. And that is what some - not to honorable people- try to - Who Says Safe Lists Don't Work?
Spam rules not withstanding, prospect-targeted email marketing is still one of the best ways to prom
Most viewed articles in this category:
- How To Be More Specific In Blocking Spam
Spam is often thought to be such a difficult subject. But actually, it is not as difficult to compre - The REAL Origins and Meaning of the Word SPAM
There's a lot of false information out there about why we refer to mass unsolicited commercial maili - How Web Sites Can Generate Spam Email
Every day tens of thousands of new web sites come online, many attracting big audiences, often due t - Who are Spammers
Most of us receive spam at one time or another. A spammer is someone who sends unsolicited e-mails i - Why a Blocked List of Email Addresses is Useless
Do you maintain a list of blocked email addresses in your email system?This is one of the biggest wa - How to Manage Your Email Inbox More Effectively
Your inbox is the nerve centre to your incoming email, but all too often is clogged up with dozens o - How to Prevent Email Spam
You should have heard much about spam. What exactly spam is? I define spam as something unrequested. - What Should We Do About Spam?
I receive over 50 emails per day. Usually, close to 45 of them are spam. For the uninitiated, unso - The Definition of Spam - Do You Know What spam eMail Really is?
The word "Spam" as applied to Email means Unsolicited Bulk Email ("UBE").Unsolicited means that the - Spam, Lovely Spam, Wonderful Spam
Do you remember the quote from the Monty Python sketch in 1970. Spam is nowadays mostly known to be