by Raleigh Stout

Created on: April 24, 2008

All spam is bad. Unfortunately, people with good intentions will sign up for online advertising emails and end up with spam anyway, to the extent that it goes well beyond their control.

Spammers continue to be sued in the courts by the US Federal Trade Commission for good reasons. Among them is the fact that spammers take advantage of free email to promote illegal or otherwise inappropriate offers to consumers with no intention of identifying themselves properly and often without the prior consent of the consumers receiving the emails. The reward is financial gain for the spammer, often at the expense of time and money lost by the consumer.

Consumers must sift through long lists of spam emails in order to identify the correspondence they most desire to read and consider to be spam-free. They lose a lot of time and even lose legitimate emails that they otherwise would be able to answer.

If the consumer replies to the spam, then this merely confirms to the spammer that the email address is active and it then becomes sold and added to even more email lists used by spammers. The effect is that much more spam arrives in the consumer's email inbox.

Spam emails thus overwhelm mailboxes and recipients to the point that it is becoming impossible for the average email user to review them all to discern what is valid and wanted. Most users are not familiar with filtering while they are becoming increasingly familiar with reporting spam.

While it is true that current spam is becoming less and less contaminated with viruses and spyware, the fact remains that spam continues to deliver viruses and spyware and other malicious code to the recipient's computer, necessitating a virus and malware scan in order to catch such new infections. Email attachments are one means of delivering malicious code to computers; links to infected web sites are another.

Another reason that spam is bad is that it congests the world wide web. As much as 97 percent of all emails are now identified as spam and bulk emails, preventing valid and legitimate email correspondence from timely arrival and even slowing down the ability of Internet users to quickly connect to their desired web sites.

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