Understanding Spam

Spam is a problem nearly as old as the Internet. In fact, the first spam was sent many years before the term was coined. On May 1, 1978 a tech savvy marketing agent sent every contact he had an advertisement for something they didn't ask for. What was it? Ironically, computer equipment.

It was not until several years later (1985) that the term spam became linked with the idea of bombarding computer users with something they didn't ask for and it wouldn't come from email.

A player of an early form of networked game, an ancestor to modern games like Blizzard's World of Warcraft, sent the message: "spam spam spam" (in reference to the the Monty Python song) repeatedly to every player in the game until he was eventually booted.

Now when we think of spam we are usually referring to the email ads for larger body parts or a paycheck from someone in small country we didn't previously know about. Spammers also infest blogs and Internet forums, clogging the comments with useless ads for their junk wares. The next time you have to squint and copy some heavily twisted letters into a box to prove you are human (the CAPTCHA test), thank a spammer and their automated posting tools.

Were did you get this email address?

Ever wonder how a spammer got your email address in the first place? It's likely they used a bot to snatch it of the web. Spammers use software programs to visit thousands of websites searching for email addresses and harvesting them into massive lists. It's also possible that they purchased it. Many spammers do a brisk business in the buying and selling of your information.

But I didn't send that junk!

Have you ever gotten an angry email from someone claiming that you spammed them? Or stranger yet, gotten a message that appears to be from yourself? Spammers very rarely use valid email addresses. Usually their purpose is to get you to click a link in the message. Faking the From line is a trivial task. It's just like writing a letter and putting a false return address on the envelope. Just as with real mail, there are signs of tampering if you look hard enough, but to a casual eye, it can be deceiving.