Talk:Spamming

Chain email spam

I don't know enough to write this myself, but...
a) is there a name for the emails that say "if you send this to 11 people a video will pop up on your screen"? b) is this spam as such, or does it have another name?

I agree with this. Chain email is annoying and it drains resources in the same manner as regular spam. I consider it spam, just on a more personal level in the sense that you usually know the spammer. -- Kibeth

Emails that ask you to send the email to a certain number of people are labeled as either a chain email spam or a chain email scam. This is actually not as confusing as it sounds. See spam becomes a scam the moment the email asks you to donate money or to buy a fraudulent service. For more information on email scams visit http://www.spamlaws.com/chain-letters-email-scams.html . If you like to learn more about Spam, check out all you need to know about spam at http://www.spamlaws.com/what-is-spam.html.

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UCE

What is UCE? -- Zoe

UCE == Unsolicited Commercial Email; UBE == Unsolicited Bulk Email. Spam is often defined by antispammers as "UCE or UBE". That is to say, if you get mail you didn't ask for and it is either commercial (advertising something), or bulk (duplicate messages have been sent to a large number of other people), or both, then it is spam.

"Antispammers" or "spamfighters" are people (usually mail system administrators, but sometimes just concerned users) who try to stop spam. They do this by teaching people why spam is bad (and ineffective); by advocating laws and suits against it; by encouraging ISPs to kick off spammers; and by implementing technical means to reduce spam, such as filters and DNSBLs.

You can learn a lot about spam, spammers, antispammers, and so forth from the Spam FAQs at http://www.spamfaq.net/ and on the newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email. --FOo Spamlaws.com at http://www.spamlaws.com is a pretty informative site too, if you like to know how to stop spam from reaching your inbox and what spam filter and blocker to use.

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Philosophical questions or Advocacy?

67.194.67.71 added a large section entitled "Philosophical questions" which, while insightful in some ways, is phrased as a piece of advocacy. (See this diff.) I have incorporated some of the concerns expressed into the page in a more neutral form. I invite additions to the "political" section by those who can more clearly express these concerns.

As for the question of the page being too strong of a stand against spam -- in my experience there are precious few arguments for spamming. Spammers usually claim not to be doing anything wrong, but they don't exactly claim to be doing anything right. Email spamming is not after all a sustainable practice; unchecked, it renders email unusable, thereby destroying the very resource it is parasitical upon. --FOo

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Expanded

Expanded the links and added some structure for others to build on. Or me, later. Will probably evolve into some sort of practical tools page eventually but this is as good a place to start as any. JamesDay

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CAN-SPAM vs. Can Spam

CAN-SPAM refers to "Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing." The act was put into play on January 2004 to give guidelines for those sending out commercial emails, write penalties for spammers, and provide consumers with the right to opt out of unwanted mail. (CAN-SPAM is always used with a hypen, for those who were curious.) For information on the CAN-SPAM act visit: http://www.spamlaws.com/spam-laws.html

Wiki spam

Wiki spam isn't mentioned, I guess because the structure of this page dates from before it was significant. It is treated as a subsection of blog spam.

Maybe things should be reorganised to reflect two kinds of spam on the net, "traditional" spam and spam that doesn't target the user but just aims at boosting the pagerank (But which is still called spam)

I see things this way :

Spamming in different media

E-mail spam
Messaging spam
Newsgroup spam
Mobile phone spam
Internet telephony spam

Search engine spam (or pagerank maximizing ?)

Spamdexing (search engine spam)
Blog spam
Wiki Spam

Or better,

Spam targeting users, and
Spam targeting search engines

Hmm. I guess I may as well go make the modification right away. I'm not sure if it's the proper etiquette, but it sure beats saying something should be done and then going off to bed :)

New Study

Ya'all might want to add stuff from here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4432231.stm

Request for Reference: Named after Monty Python sketch

Could someone provide a reliable reference for the information that spamming was named after the applicable Monty Python sketch? Information on such word derivations can often be apocryphal, and I'd be much more comfortable if it had an explicit reference in the article. The one link I could find, to a rec.games.mud posting, contained several people disputing the etymology. -- Creidieki 4 July 2005 17:28 (UTC)

See the Brad Templeton cite linked from the article: http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamterm.html

See also the Net-Abuse FAQ, section 2.4, for citation from Nathan J. Mehl who knew the guy (or possibly, was the guy, ahem) who originally "spammed" Pern MUSH: http://www.cybernothing.org/faqs/net-abuse-faq.html#2.4

Also see the rec.games.mud FAQ on the subject of "unintentional spamming" as mentioned in the Alternate meanings section of this article: http://www.mudconnect.com/mudfaq/mudfaq-p1.html#q33

In other words, it all started with a jerk who decided to disrupt a role-playing game, by posting "SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM" over and over again, in imitation of the Vikings from Monty Python. --FOo 4 July 2005 17:56 (UTC)

New forms of spam

In the article the paragraph immediately after the beginning of this sub-section (New forms of spam) is not complete. It may have been inadvertently edited out during previous editing sessions. HJKeats 7 July 2005 16:52 (UTC)

Agreed. I reverted to the previous version. Eric 7 July 2005 17:44 (UTC)

AOL Shocking Statement in TV advertisement

In a television advertisement, AOL has publicized that some Spam carries viruses, and even has the means to effect identity theft. The spammers using spam as a weapon hope that, you the user, open it, only to have a virus destroy your hard drive, mess up your programming, software, comandeer it to continue their attacks, and even steal your identity to effect other crimes, while you, on the other hand, pay for these crimes committed by the spammer, his/her allies, even end up in prison for what these criminals have done. Try to imagine having YOUR identity taken and used for criminal activities. This happened to one of my family members. Took awhile to clean up the mess generated by the thieves. -anon. (cleanup: Elvey)

02:54, 28 November 2005 Tinykohls

Rolled this back - while it was interesting, it was covered in the above section on IM spam.

Redefining spam to include all the new varieties?

Current

Spamming is the use of any electronic communications medium to send unsolicited messages to someone in bulk.

Proposed

Spamming is the use of any low-transaction-cost communication medium for individual gain at the expense of the network, community, or individual.

Why do I think it should change? For every major network effect enabled information technology, there is either a present or theoretical corresponding type of malicious behavior (referred to as variants of spam, spim, blam, etc). This is due to an indirect increase in utility from the position of the malicious user: not every new member is a spammer, but every new member is a potential target for spamming. So "spam happens" when the barrier to entry for spammers is less than the utility of spamming memebers of the community.

Oppose; 1)I see nothing wrong with the definition in the article that justifies a new one. 2)The most common meaning of spam I know is simply UBE. We shouldn't stray too far from it, IMO. 3) UBE over high-cost links such as satellite or international phone call or SMS links can be far from "low-transaction-cost". 4)Bulk is a key component missing from the proposed definition. Elvey

Words like "spam" are already being applied too loosely. Your proposed definition just makes things even more vague. Also, all to often what qualifies as "individual gain at the expense of the network, community, or individual" is highly subjective.

Oppose; I believe that in networking, spam refers primarily to email messages. Other uses are metaphorical. Note also this article should also mention SPIT (SPam over Internet Telephony). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VoIP_spam —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.20.227.50 (talk) 20:27, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

External Link

Added Feb. 4th, 2011 by Knuddi Some of the reports are quite outdated and hence I suggest to add the live statistics of the most spam sending countries. These graphs are actually updated every hour and you can see how f.ex US spam decreases over the day when many home computers are switched off and the botnet is not active.

https://www.scanmailx.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6&Itemid=34 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Knuddi (talk • contribs) 08:56, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

I couldn't find a place in the "cost of spam" section for this spam cost calculator. It would be a good external link. http://www.commtouch.com/spam-cost-calculator

Drcarver (talk) 10:16, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

>People who create electronic spam are called spammers.

wouldnt be "spammer" the right term? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.205.31.73 (talk) 17:37, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

Motivation?

What about the motivation to do spamming? It seems to do pay off, but why? It seems that most spammers do not advertise products they want to sell or websites they own themselves. So there must be people who pay spammers for advertising their products/websites by spamming. Does it pay off for these people? Of course, if you send a quadrillion mails (which costs you neither time nor money) and get one customer buy your thing, it paid off. But how many customers can you actually get by spam mails? So the question is: how much do you pay a professional spammer for doing his job? And do you pay him for sent mails or for what? And on the other side: Why do people become spammers? And how? Are we even talking about masses of spammers, or are they just a few people, but seem like millions? Are there a lot of professional spammers or is it more an auxiliary income? I think the article could be improved by giving answers to some of these questions.--TeakHoken193.187.211.118 (talk) 13:13, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

recent vandalism by apokalupsis

user apokalupsis was involved in an argument on a video game forum where he misused the word spam rather than admit his mistake he came here to change the wiki to suit him here is where it started http://forums.station.sony.com/strategygames/posts/list.m?start=30&topic_id=52744 just thought you might want to know thx