All About Spam 1 Richard Clayton
All about “Spam”
Email continues to be by far the most important service for Internet users 1 . Billions of
messages are transferred every day. Unfortunately, as every user is well aware, a
proportion of this traffic is unsolicited and unwanted advertising. This is often called 2
“spam”3 in memory of the Monty Python sketch from the 1970s4 where a group of
Vikings sat in a café and incessantly chanted “spam, spam, spam, spam...” and
eventually drowned out all other conversation.
The nature and cost of spam
Sending and receiving email is very cheap and it is tempting to see spam as an
ecologically friendly alternative to the paper based “junk mail” delivered in daily
batches to most households and businesses. However, the cost should not be measured
in the fractions of a penny that it takes to transmit the bytes down the wire. The real
costs of spam are in the time spent by users to sort through the unwanted dross, the
size of mail system that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) must provide to store and
forward the material, and in the delays to genuine messages caused by the overloading
of systems5. These costs run, even conservatively estimated, into billions every year6
Individual emails are often sent “unsolicited”, and there’s no problem with that, the
distinction that makes “spam” different – and makes it unacceptable – is that it is sent
in bulk (sometimes many millions of copies at a time). It tends to be commercial in
nature, often promoting products of dubious legality or taste, or “get rich quick”
schemes designed to extract money from the gullible.
Some people like to try and distinguish messages sent by companies from other types
of spam by using terms like UCE (unsolicited commercial email) rather than UBE
(unsolicited bulk email). Others argue that different rules ought to be applied to
religious or political messages, or that writing on behalf of a charity might make the
11 Nielsen//NetRatings finds e-mail is the dominant online activity worldwide (May 9, 2002)
2 Purists would argue that “spam” should only be applied to the bulk posting of articles on Usenet, but
the usage in relation to email is now so widespread that this has become a matter of etymological
interest rather than a useful distinction.
3 SPAM is a Registered Trademark of Hormel Foods Inc who have been manufacturing SPAM
Luncheon Meat since the 1930s. They explain the legal complexities which occur when a trademark
becomes a slang term at
http://www.spam.com/ci/ci_in.htm.
4
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~ddgarcia/spam.html#MontyPython
5 Report to the Federal Trade Commission of the Ad-Hoc Working Group on Unsolicited Commercial
Email.
http://www.cdt.org/spam/
6 The European Commission study of Jan 2001 put the cost at ºELOOLRQworldwide for the connection
cost alone.
http://europa.eu.int/comm/internal_market/en/dataprot/studies/spamstudyen.pdf. Although
this document has been criticised in some quarters, these figures are not out of line with other surveys.
