What is Spam?
Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, mobile phone messaging spam, internet forum spam and junk fax transmissions.
"Spam harvesters" are well known for scanning Usenet services for email addresses that are then incorporated into their email lists that are used to send unsolicited email.
Spam is prevalent on the Internet because the transaction cost of electronic communications is radically less than any alternate form of communication. Spam has most recently evolved to include wikispam and blogspam; with comments normally submitted via a 'robot'.
History of Spam
The first widely recognized Usenet spam (though not the most famous) was posted on January 18, 1994 by Clarence L. Thomas IV, a sysadmin at Andrews University. Entitled "Global Alert for All: Jesus is Coming Soon" (link to Google archive), it was a fundamentalist religious tract claiming that "this world's history is coming to a climax." The newsgroup posting bot Serdar Argic also appeared in early 1994, posting tens of thousands of messages to various newsgroups, consisting of identical copies of a political screed relating to the Armenian Genocide.
The first instance of a post being called 'spam' actually came from an accidental spamming incident. In 1993, while testing moderation software, a Usenet administrator sent over 200 consecutive articles to news.admin.policy. Participants recognized this flood as spam, a slang term used for similar floods on BBS networks.
The first commercial Usenet spam, and the one which is often (mistakenly) claimed to be the first Usenet spam of any sort, was an advertisement for legal services entitled "Green Card Lottery - Final One?". It was posted in April 1994 by Arizona lawyers Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, and hawked legal representation for United States immigrants seeking papers ("green cards").
Usenet convention defines spamming as excessive multiple posting, that is, the repeated posting of a message (or substantially similar messages). During the early 1990s there was substantial controversy among Usenet system administrators (news admins) over the use of cancel messages to control spam. A cancel message is a directive to news servers to delete a posting, causing it to be inaccessible to those who might read it. Some regarded this as a bad precedent, leaning towards censorship, while others considered it a proper use of the available tools to control the growing spam problem.
A culture of neutrality towards content precluded defining spam on the basis of advertisement or commercial solicitations. The word "spam" was usually taken to mean excessive multiple posting (EMP), and other neologisms were coined for other abuses — such as "velveeta" (from the processed cheese product) for excessive cross-posting. A subset of spam was deemed cancellable spam, for which it is considered justified to issue third-party cancel messages.
In the late 1990s, spam became used as a means of vandalising newsgroups, with malicious users committing acts of sporgery to make targeted newsgroups all but unreadable without heavily filtering. A prominent example occurred in alt.religion.scientology. Another known example is the Meow Wars.
The prevalence of Usenet spam led to the development of the Breidbart Index as an objective measure of a message's "spamminess". The use of the BI and spam-detection software has led to Usenet being policed by anti-spam volunteers, who purge newsgroups of spam by sending cancels and filtering it out on the way into servers. This very active form of policing has meant that Usenet is a far less attractive target to spammers than it used to be, and most of the industrial-scale spammers have now moved into e-mail spam instead.
In 1998, the New Oxford Dictionary of English, which had previously only defined "spam" in relation to the trademarked food product, added a second definition to its entry for "spam": "Irrelevant or inappropriate messages sent on the Internet to a large number of newsgroups or users.
Where did the term spam come from?
It is widely believed the term spam is derived from the Monty Python SPAM sketch, set in a cafe where nearly every item on the menu includes SPAM luncheon meat. As the server recites the SPAM-filled menu, a chorus of Viking patrons drowns out all conversations with a song repeating "SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM... lovely SPAM, wonderful SPAM", hence "SPAMming" the dialogue. The excessive amount of SPAM mentioned in the sketch is a reference to British rationing during World War II. SPAM was one of the few foods that was widely available.
Spam later came to be used on Usenet to mean excessive multiple posting—the repeated posting of the same message. The unwanted message would appear in many if not all newsgroups, just as SPAM appeared in all the menu items in the Monty Python sketch. The first usage of this sense was by Joel Furr in the aftermath of the ARMM incident of March 31, 1993, in which a piece of experimental software released dozens of recursive messages onto the news.admin.policy newsgroup. This use had also become established—to spam Usenet was flooding newsgroups with junk messages. As a portmanteau of "spew" and "scam", the word was also attributed to the flood of "Make Money Fast" messages that clogged many newsgroups during the 1990s.
Spam as denial of service
Spamming has also been used as a denial of service ("DoS") tactic, particularly on Usenet. By overwhelming the readers of a newsgroup with an inordinate number of nonsense messages, legitimate messages and computing resources can be lost in the deluge. Since these messages are usually forged (that is, sent falsely under regular posters' names) this tactic has come to be known as sporgery (from spam + forgery). This tactic has for instance been used by members of the Church of Scientology against the alt.religion.scientology newsgroup (see Scientology versus the Internet) and by spammers against news.admin.net-abuse.email, a forum for mail administrators to discuss spam problems. Applied to e-mail, this is termed mailbombing. The Usenet Meow Wars (around 1996) were DoS attacks on various newsgroups aimed at specific posters that disrupted the newsgroups where they were active. The DoS attacks launched by Hipcrime, which continue today, are more crafted as DoS attacks on entire newsgroups. The alt.sex newsgroups were rendered uninhabitable by commercial porn site spammers, partially for advertising purposes and partially to destroy a perceived free competitor. (This spawned the creation of the moderated, unspammable soc.sexuality newsgroups.)
Forged e-mail spam has been used as a tool of harassment. The spammer collects a list of addresses, then sends a spam to them signed with the name of the person he or she wishes to harass. Some recipients, angry they received spam and seeing an obvious "source", will respond angrily or pursue revenge against the apparent spammer, the forgery victim. A widely known victim of this sort of harassment was Joe's CyberPost, which has lent its name to the offense: it is known as a joe job. "Joe jobs" have been used against antispammers: in recent examples, Steve Linford of Spamhaus Project and Timothy Walton, a California attorney, have been targeted. Sometimes victims (such as ROKSO-listed spammers) are subscribed to lists that don't practice verified opt-in, such as magazine subscriptions and e-mail newsletters, a practise known as subscriptionbombing.
Spammers have abused resources set up for the purposes of anonymous speech online, such as anonymous remailers. Many of these resources have been shut down, denying their services to legitimate users.
E-mail worms or viruses may be spammed to set up an initial pool of infected machines, which resend the virus to other machines in a spam-like manner. The infected machines can often be used as remote-controlled zombie computers, for more spamming or DDoS attacks. trojans are spammed to phish for bank account details, or to set up a pool of zombies without using a virus.
Links
Where did the term "spam" come from? - templetons.com & here
Spam (Spiced Ham!!) Home Page - spam.com & Privacy Policy
Make Love not Spam - link to expired campaign.
The (Evil) Genius of Comment Spammers at - wired.com.
William R. James 2003-03-10 - Thank the Spammers.
Wikipedia.org.
Spamhaus.org - the 10 worst ISPs at spamhaus.org.
Spam definition at spamhaus.org.
Spamhaus.org - the 10 worst spammers, including Australia's own Nikhil Kumar Pragji.
Advance fee fraud (Nigerian) - Wikipedia.org.
Spam definition to Oxford dictionary (CNN.com article).
Essays on junk email and spam at www.templetons.com.
Spam at Urban Dictionay
Spam and Usenet culture eserver.org.
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