Please be aware that this document is no longer being actively maintained and it very likely no longer represents the views of Gordon Worley. I will not fix errors in it, discuss it with you, or generally even respond to e-mail about it. Having been warned, I'd rather you read this document from me rather than a cache or mirror somewhere, so I'm not going to delete it. I hope you understand and proceed with appropriate caution.
Early in the Internet's history, very few people abused forums for communication, like e-mail and Usenet. It is only recently that, with the rapid increase in new users, wide spread misuse of information sharing outlets has occurred; newsgroups and electronic mailboxes have become flooded with a phenomenon known as spam.[1] These wasteful messages can take a long to time to get ride of, depending on how many spam messages have been received, and cost money to download. The more time and money that is spent of deleting and downloading spam, the less exist for making effective use of Online information.[2] Spam is the Internet's greatest threat, because it can make the Internet less capable of supplying information by raising the cost of using it prohibitively high.
Spam began back in the 1980s on Usenet newsgroups.[3] Unsavvy newbies (new, inexperienced users) posted messages which were either off topic from the discussion group they were posted in or flamebait, messages that attract many very angry responses.[4] Eventually, these messages came to be known generally as spam, for reasons which have been lost to history.[5] At the time, though, very few spam messages existed, because, for the most part, Usenet users payed for Internet access by the hour or minute, making useless messages expensive to download, including for the original poster of such messages, and because most Usenet users were not newbies.[6]
The spam problem exploded around the mid 1990s as people began coming Online en mass. This caused a rapid influx of newbies to Usenet groups, thus creating many new sources for spam. These new users were also potential recipients of spam, causing businesses to decide to begin sending commercial spam post to Usenet as a form of 'free' advertising. Many newcomers, though, were not participating in newsgroups, so the commercial spammers developed ways of obtaining e-mail addresses, which nearly everyone had, from both Web sites and Usenet post to be used as targets for spam. Since then, the problem has steadily grown because, as more users come Online, more advertisers see e-mail and Usenet as a means of getting the word out at a low cost to them with a high viewage rate.[7]
Spam threatens to make the Internet less useful in several ways. One of these is by increasing the cost of going Online. For instance, most people around the world pay for Internet access by the hour or minute, so the amount of time that they are on it is limited by how much money they can afford to spend. In addition, phone service is commonly metered, again bringing monetary restraints upon time spent Online.[8] If these same people receive large amounts of spam, they may be forced to forego much of the Internet experience because they must take so much time sifting through spam. By the time they finish, they may not be able to afford to remain Online any longer.
In places like the United States, where phone service and Internet access are usually paid for by flat, monthly fees, the issue becomes a matter of time rather than money. Since American users have already paid of an unlimited amount of time Online for a month, they can theoretically use as much time as necessary to take care of spam. Unfortunately, often only a limited amount of time can be spent on the Internet due to work and family responsibilities. Once all of the spams have been dealt with, there may not be any time left for exploiting the Internet's information. Eventually, users may decide that they could better spend that time doing activities other than going Online to delete spam. Ergo, spam limits the usefulness of the Internet by making it too expensive to use either money or time wise.
Improving filtering software is one way to combat spam. Current filters look for specific words that would flag a message as spam, particularly the commercial variety. This is limiting, though, because they often miss many spam messages and accidentally snatch legitimate messages. As developers work on programs which can read and understand human languages, it will be possible for the computer to judge, based on the meaning of incoming e-mail messages rather than on key words, whether messages are spam or not. This is still limiting, though, because legitimate e-mail can sometimes look like spam (e.g. a friend tells another friend about a really great deal on a product that they found) and spammers have historically found ways of evading filtering systems by changing the way that their messages are written.[9] By improving filters, at least more spam will be blockable than was before.
Another solution is to fight spam at its source. Spam is not only expensive for the recipient, but also for the owner of the e-mail system whence the message was sent, though to a lesser extent. If recipients of spam take the time to inform the owners of the servers that the spam is coming from, then those spammers can be stopped by taking away their accounts, ending their costly practices. This is usually only a temporary solution, though, because the removed spammer will likely find a new e-mail account to send messages from. Plus, it is time consuming for the recipients of spam to constantly send messages, trying to put an end to spammers.
The former solution has the advantage of being able to remove spam before it is ever seen, while the second solution requires having seen spam before it can be stopped. On the other hand, the latter stops the problem at its source and does not cause desired messages to be blocked. Both solutions are ways of curbing spam, but, ultimately, neither one is really capable to stopping the problem altogether. In fact, it is probably impossible to put an end to spam, because someone will always abuse the system, whether for profit or by mistake. Spam is a fact of using the Internet, so, at best, the aforementioned solutions can only decrease the amount of spam that must be confronted.