We have all been there. You log in to check your email and you have fifty messages. Wow! Aren’t you popular? Well, maybe. But it’s more likely that over half of those email are junk emails that you won’t read. These junk emails are referred to as spam. The accepted origin of the term is based on a 1970’s Monty Python skit. If you have never seen the skit, look it up on youtube and it’ll all make sense.
Spam comes in many forms. Charity emails asking for money, chain messages with threats that you’ll have bad luck if you don’t forward it to ten of your closest friends, scams asking for personal information, emails that look like your bank account… It never ends. And some of these emails can contain viruses that will destroy your computer.
People try everything to stop getting these messages. Create a new email address and only giving it out to select people. Block emails from people you know are sending you spam. Turn your spam filter all the way. Yet still you have half a dozen spam emails left!
So who started all this mess? The first documented spam email was sent in 1978 from a DEC marking rep named Gary Thuerk in attempts to inform recipients of DEC’s Arpanet support. This opened the door for floods of spam to take over user’s inboxes world wide for years to come.
Thank you Gary Thuerk. In his defense, it wasn’t malicious. He was just looking for a new way to advertise.
As early as 1994, people have been trying to discover ways of dealing with this global problem. Most terms of service policies, (defined by internet providers) have rules against spam. Congress has even passed the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marking Act of 2003, in effort to stop the spammers from sending unwanted messages. However, the act does not make spam illegal; it places the regulations on mass emails.
- Headers must be truthful and content made clear.
- Origin of message cannot be falsified.
- Messages must not be sent through open relay.
- Email addresses of recipients cannot be harvested.
- Users can unsubscribe to a mailing list and their request must be honored within 10 days;
Religious, political and national security messages are exempt from this law. Also if the user has a prior relationship with a company in anyway the company need only to give the user an unsubscribe option (all other rules do not apply). So all of those emails you keep getting from Best Buy because you ordered a video game three years ago, is not technically spam. Just update your email preferences in your account and they’ll stop.
Spam saves companies around the world millions of dollars a year in postage. Yet to internet users, spam has become not only an annoyance, but an expense to those around the globe using dial-up connections. Bandwidth and storage space are wasted everyday by the distribution of spam emails.
We do have some methods of fighting back against spam. Some of the earliest spam filters used language analysis. It would search emails for words and phrases commonly used in spam emails. This works okay in some cases but only dents the problem. Some spam filters may look to see if an email was sent in bulk however this is often hard to detect.
Blacklisting is another method. Sites and email addresses that are known to send out spam can be added to a list that is then shared with other users online. The exact opposite of this is whitelisting. This is when a user rejects all users that are not on the list. Blacklisting has obvious holes; a spammer might not be on the list. Whitelisting however seems like the perfect solution… but it’s not. Someone could use a common domain name to bypass the list. Plus, do you really want to have to keep such a list update? And if the list was out of date you might miss something important. Greylisting is a third option in this category that will reject all messages but tell the sender to try again later. If they do, it’s more likely that it’s a person than a spammer.
Other filters use various statistical analysis methods to make a judgements about whether an email is spam or not considering the words, order of words, frequency of words and percentage of the text is the same as known spam emails.
Whatever method you chose, you are still faced with one problem and that is emails that are incorrectly labeled as spam. It might get so bad that you are searching your spam inbox for your emails. And if that’s what you are doing… well there really isn’t might difference is there?