Spamming is the use of messaging systems to send an unsolicited message ( spam ), especially advertising, as well as sending messages repeatedly on the same site. While the most widely recognized form of spam is email spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, online classified ads spam, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet forum spam, junk fax transmissions, social spam, spam mobile apps,[1] television advertising and file sharing spam. It is named after Spam, a luncheon meat, by way of a Monty Python sketch about a restaurant that has Spam in every dish and where patrons annoyingly chant “Spam” over and over again.[2][3]
Spamming remains economically viable because advertisers have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists, servers, infrastructures, IP ranges, and domain names, and it is difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings. The costs, such as lost productivity and fraud, are borne by the public and by Internet service providers, which have been forced to add extra capacity to cope with the volume. Spamming has been the subject of legislation in many jurisdictions.[4]
A person who creates spam is called a spammer .[5]
EtymologyEdit
Menu from Monty Python’s “Spam” sketch, from where the term is derived. Spam is included in almost every dish to the consternation of a customer.
The term spam is derived from the 1970 Spam sketch of the BBC television comedy series Monty Python’s Flying Circus .[3][6] The sketch, set in a cafe, has a waitress reading out a menu where every item includes Spamcanned luncheon meat. As the waitress recites the Spam-filled menu, a chorus of Viking patrons drown out all conversations with a song, repeating “Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam… Lovely Spam! Wonderful Spam!”.[7]The excessive amount of Spam mentioned is a reference to the ubiquity of it and other imported canned meat products in the UK after World War II (a period of rationing in the UK) as the country struggled to rebuild its agricultural base.
In the 1980s the term was adopted to describe certain abusive users who frequented BBSs and MUDs, who would repeat “Spam” a huge number of times to scroll other users’ text off the screen.[8] In early chat-room services like PeopleLink and the early days of Online America (later known as America Online or AOL), they actually flooded the screen with quotes from the Monty Python Spam sketch.[ citation needed ] This was used as a tactic by insiders of a group that wanted to drive newcomers out of the room so the usual conversation could continue. It was also used to prevent members of rival groups from chatting—for instance, Star Wars fans often invaded Star Trek chat rooms, filling the space with blocks of text until the Star Trek fans left.[9]
It later came to be used on Usenet to mean excessive multiple posting—the repeated posting of the same message. The unwanted message would appear in many, if not all newsgroups, just as Spam appeared in all the menu items in the Monty Python sketch. The first usage of this sense was by Joel Furr[10][11] This use had also become established—to “spam” Usenet was to flood newsgroups with junk messages. The word was also attributed to the flood of “Make Money Fast” messages that clogged many newsgroups during the 1990s.[ citation needed ] In 1998, the New Oxford Dictionary of English, which had previously only defined “spam” in relation to the trademarked food product, added a second definition to its entry for “spam”: “Irrelevant or inappropriate messages sent on the Internet to a large number of newsgroups or users.”
There was also an effort to differentiate between types of newsgroup spam. Messages that were crossposted to too many newsgroups at once, as opposed to those that were posted too frequently, were called velveeta (after a cheese product), but this term did not persist.[12]
Pre-InternetEdit
In the late 19th century, Western Unionallowed telegraphic messages on its network to be sent to multiple destinations. The first recorded instance of a mass unsolicited commercial telegram is from May 1864, when some British politicians received an unsolicited telegram advertising a dentist.[13]
The earliest documented spam (although the term had not yet been coined[14]) was a message advertising the availability of a new model of Digital Equipment Corporationcomputers sent by Gary Thuerk to 393 recipients on ARPANET on May 3, 1978.[10]Rather than send a separate message to each person, which was the standard practice at the time, he had an assistant, Carl Gartley, write a single mass email. Reaction from the net community was fiercely negative, but the spam did generate some sales.[15][16]
Spamming had been practiced as a prank by participants in multi-user dungeon games, to fill their rivals’ accounts with unwanted electronic junk.[16]
The first major commercial spam incident started on March 5, 1994, when a husband and wife team of lawyers, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, began using bulk Usenetposting to advertise immigration law services. The incident was commonly termed the “Green Card spam”, after the subject line of the postings. Defiant in the face of widespread condemnation, the attorneys claimed their detractors were hypocrites or “zealouts”, claimed they had a free speechright to send unwanted commercial messages, and labeled their opponents “anti-commerce radicals”. The couple wrote a controversial book entitled How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway .[16]
An early example of nonprofit fundraising bulk posting via Usenet also occurred in 1994 on behalf of CitiHope, an NGO attempting to raise funds to rescue children at risk during the Bosnian War. However, as it was a violation of their terms of service, the ISP Panix deleted all of the bulk posts from Usenet, only missing three copies[ citation needed ].
Within a few years, the focus of spamming (and anti-spam efforts) moved chiefly to email, where it remains today.[8] By 1999, Khan C. Smith, a well known hacker at the time, had begun to commercialize the bulk email industry and rallied thousands into the business by building more friendly bulk email software and providing internet access illegally hacked from major ISPs such as Earthlink and Botnets.[17]
By 2009 the majority of spam sent around the World was in the English language; spammers began using automatic translation services to send spam in other languages.[18]
In different mediaEdit
Main article: Email spam
Email spam, also known as unsolicited bulk email (UBE), or junk mail, is the practice of sending unwanted email messages, frequently with commercial content, in large quantities. Spam in email started to become a problem when the Internet was opened for commercial use in the mid-1990s. It grew exponentially over the following years, and by 2007 it composed some 80 to 85 percent of all e-mail, by a conservative estimate.[19]Pressure to make email spam illegal has resulted in legislation in some jurisdictions, but less so in others. The efforts taken by governing bodies, security systems and email service providers seem to be helping to reduce the volume of email spam. According to “2014 Internet Security Threat Report, Volume 19” published by Symantec Corporation, spam volume dropped to 66% of all email traffic.[20]
An industry of email address harvesting is dedicated to collecting email addresses and selling compiled databases.[21] Some of these address-harvesting approaches rely on users not reading the fine print of agreements, resulting in their agreeing to send messages indiscriminately to their contacts. This is a common approach in social networking spamsuch as that generated by the social networking site Quechup.[22]
Instant messagingEdit
Main article: Messaging spam
Instant messaging spam makes use of instant messaging systems. Although less prevalent than its e-mail counterpart, according to a report from Ferris Research, 500 million spam IMs were sent in 2003, twice the level of 2002.[23]
Newsgroup and forumEdit
Main article: Newsgroup spam
Newsgroup spam is a type of spam where the targets are Usenet newsgroups. Spamming of Usenet newsgroups actually pre-dates e-mail spam. Usenet convention defines spamming as excessive multiple posting, that is, the repeated posting of a message (or substantially similar messages). The prevalence of Usenet spam led to the development of the Breidbart Index as an objective measure of a message’s “spamminess”.
Main article: Forum spam
Forum spam is the creation of advertising messages on Internet forums. It is generally done by automated spambots. Most forum spam consists of links to external sites, with the dual goals of increasing search engine visibility in highly competitive areas such as weight loss, pharmaceuticals, gambling, pornography, real estate or loans, and generating more traffic for these commercial websites. Some of these links contain code to track the spambot’s identity; if a sale goes through, the spammer behind the spambot earns a commission.
Mobile phoneEdit
Main article: Mobile phone spam
Mobile phone spam is directed at the text messaging service of a mobile phone. This can be especially irritating to customers not only for the inconvenience, but also because of the fee they may be charged per text message received in some markets. To comply with CAN-SPAM regulations in the US, SMS messages now must provide options of HELP and STOP, the latter to end communication with the advertiser via SMS altogether.
Despite the high number of phone users, there has not been so much phone spam, because there is a charge for sending SMS. Recently, there are also observations of mobile phone spam delivered via browser push notifications. These can be a result of allowing websites which are malicious or delivering malicious ads to send a user notifications.[24]
Social networking spamEdit
Main article: Social networking spam
Facebook and Twitter are not immune to messages containing spam links. Spammers hack into accounts and send false links under the guise of a user’s trusted contacts such as friends and family.[25] As for Twitter, spammers gain credibility by following verified accounts such as that of Lady Gaga; when that account owner follows the spammer back, it legitimizes the spammer.[26]Twitter has studied what interest structures allow their users to receive interesting tweets and avoid spam, despite the site using the broadcast model, in which all tweets from a user are broadcast to all followers of the user.[27] Spammers, out of malicious intent, post either unwanted (or irrelevant) information or spread misinformation on social media platforms.[28]
Social spamEdit
Spreading beyond the centrally managed social networking platforms, user-generated content increasingly appears on business, government, and nonprofit websites worldwide. Fake accounts and comments planted by computers programmed to issue social spam can infiltrate these websites.[29]
Online game messagingEdit
Many online games allow players to contact each other via player-to-player messaging, chat rooms, or public discussion areas. What qualifies as spam varies from game to game, but usually this term applies to all forms of message flooding, violating the terms of service contract for the website. This is particularly common in MMORPGs where the spammers are trying to sell game-related “items” for real-world money, chiefly among them being in-game currency. In gameplay terms, spamming also refers to the repetitive use of the same combat skills as a cheap tactic (e.g. “to defeat the blue dragon, just spam fireballs”).
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