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The scourge of the electronic world

Anyone who is connected to the Internet has likely encountered spam. And if you've seen some spam, you've likely seen tons of spam! Like lemmings, spam doesn't come in small numbers! But sometimes you're not sure if something is legitimate or if it's really spam I mean it made it through the spam filter software, right?

Spam used to only refer to the can of lunch meat made popular during World War II. Then Monty Python came long and did a comedy sketch about "spam spam spam bacon and spam". In the comedy sketch, the word "spam" is used so much it almost obscures the meaning of the other words. Electronic spam is very much like this last example it is an abuse of electronic communication of many forms by people sending unsolicited bulk messages.

Most people only think of spam as a problem experienced in e-mail. While e-mail was one of the first targets for spam, it has expanded to include all forms of electronic communication from newsgroups instant messaging to mobile phone messages and even comments spammed on blogs and guestbooks. If you've recently tried to host a blog or website with a guestbook, you know about the people who seem to enjoy trying to post nonsense comments that seem to promote one website or another. No matter what form of communication spam invades, it wastes the time of readers everywhere as we try to sort valid from unwanted information.

Well, all that is fine and dandy but I'm sure you are still asking how you can tell what spam is. The problem is that one person's spam is another person's legitimate messages. This statement isn't always true, but let's compare the subjects of e-mail an accountant normally receives while doing their business and compare that to the e-mail a pharmaceutical salesman receives. For their jobs, both sets of e-mail are legitimate. However, if the accountant got the same e-mail the salesman gets it would be considered spam. Honestly the opposite is true too the salesman doesn't want to be bombarded by tables of meaningless numbers.

It's this subjectivity that has caused so many problems in the fight against spam. An application that filters your e-mail and prevents spam from reaching you is not perfect. It can only catch so much spam without wrongly catching some valid e-mail as well. Nearly all spam filters can improve greatly if you "train" them by reporting back e-mails that are either categorized as spam or legit. Once the spam filter "learns" your patterns it will keep much more spam from reaching you. But any spam filter running on your computer will noticeably slow your computer down when it's checking incoming e-mail. This can get annoying if you get a lot of e-mail and you're trying to do work.

There are spam filter applications for nearly all targets of spam these days, with mobile phones being one of the latest. Large companies have gone a major step beyond that and installed a specialized computer to filter all incoming e-mail and communications for spam based on company policies. This allows the company to ensure the spam filter is maintained at professional levels, and it offloads all that work from your computer.

If you are receiving messages that you didn't ask for and don't want, you are getting spam. The only things you can do about them are delete them yourself as they arrive, or talk to your network administrator about more advanced spam

Learn more about this author, David B Hitchcock.
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