Anti Spam

Electronic junk mail or junk newsgroup postings. Some people define spam even more generally as any unsolicited e-mail. However, if a long-lost brother finds your e-mail address and sends you a message, this could hardly be called spam, even though it's unsolicited. Real spam is generally e-mail advertising for some product sent to a mailing list or newsgroup. In addition to wasting people's time with unwanted e-mail, spam also eats up a lot of network bandwidth. Consequently, there are many organizations, as well as individuals, who have taken it upon themselves to fight spam with a variety of techniques. But because the Internet is public, there is really little that can be done to prevent spam, just as it is impossible to prevent junk mail. However, some online services have instituted policies to prevent spammers from spamming their subscribers.

An e-mail message sent to a large number of people without consent, also known as Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (UCE) or junk e-mail. Spam is usually sent to promote a product or service. It is also found in newsgroups, where people post identical and irrelevant messages to many different newsgroups that have nothing to do with the content of the posting. Some newsgroup users distinguish spam from Velveeta (which is to cross-post to an excessive number of newsgroups), and consider spam to be worse because posting messages separately drains more disk space and network bandwidth.

As a broadcast, spam is characterized by its large volume. Spammers follow the traditional direct-marketing ploy of saturating the intended audience, hoping for a tiny return-from less than 1 percent up to 5 percent. Spammers don't care about the large number of people they irritate or offend, because there always seems to be those few people who visit their advertised Web site or order their product.

Contrary to popular belief, "spam is not protected by national Free Speech laws because free speech guarantees you the right to say what you want (within reason), it does not guarantee you a platform to make yourself heard in." For example, your "daily newspaper will take any commercial advertisement subject to two constraints: (a) it must fit within their advertising guidelines, and (b) the advertiser must pay for the costs of distribution. Spam fails on both of these counts." Also contrary to popular belief, "anti-spam is not censorship because censorship is blocking information based on its content whereas spam-blocking attempts to keep the content in its proper place." Another example, your "local public library has a bulletin board where people can post for-sale ads and business cards; they would be rightfully upset at someone who inserted an advertising flyer inside every book on the shelves, which is the equivalent of posting a notice to every Usenet group."