SPAM-Fighting Tips

• Use a unique e-mail address
• Use multiple e-mail addresses
• "Mask" your e-mail address
• Check the website's privacy policy before you submit your address
• Beware of fraud
• Use tools to help prevent spam

For more information on these SPAM-fighting tips please visit www.getnetwise.org

Spam's effect on Business

• IDC estimates that spam represented 32% of all email sent on an average day in North America in 2003
• Anti-spam solutions have helped organizations save millions of dollars in lost email user and IT staff productivity.
• 62% say their employers use filters to block spam from their work email accounts; half of them get no spam at all in those accounts.
• Calculated on a worldwide basis, the IT cost of dealing with spam will rise from $20.5 billion in 2003, to approximately $198 billion by 2007.

History of SPAM

• The earliest documented junk e-mailing was sent in 1978 by DEC- Digital Equipment Corporation
• The word SPAM came from a "spam skit" by Monty Python's Flying Circus. In the skit, a restaurant serves a lot food with spam in it and the server repeats the word several times in describing how much spam is in the food on the menu. In the skit a group of Vikings in the corner of the restaurant start to sing a song, "spam ,spam , spam, spam, spam, lovely spam! Wonderful spam! They sang the song until they were told to shut up. So the meaning of SPAM became known as "something that keeps repeating and repeating to great annoyance."
• The first large commercial SPAM was sent in April 1994 by two lawyers. They posted a message advertising a "green card" lottery. They hired a programmer to write a script to post their ad to every single newsgroup on USENET (the world's largest online conferencing system). Quickly people identified this as SPAM and the word caught on.

Innovation of SPAM Worldwide

• Largest producers of SPAM:  United States, Russia, and China
• Number of countries affected by SPAM: too many
• Countries that have laws against SPAM (here are a few): United States, Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Japan, Panama, Peru, Russia, South Korea, Yugoslavia
• Spam increases the most around the world during holidays:  for example- around Valentine's Day people are more vulnerable to click on advertisements that are related to that holiday.

SPAM in the future

Recently I have contacted employers via email and have received automated emails back from their email addresses telling me to respond to the email if I am not spam.  Companies and individuals are becoming smarter about blocking their spam emails.  This is making it harder for spammers to do their work.  Although you may not think you are receiving less spam on a daily basis, Internet servers are constantly trying to block these useless advertisments.  SPAM may never be completely gone, but more people are learning how to ignore it and therefore causing spammers to create other ways so they can reach millions of people.

Take the SPAMMER test!

This test will let you know if you are a spammer.

Click on the link below and scroll down until you see question number one.

http://www.hatchoo.com/spam/

"Porn Rules Over Drugs"

While researching the effectiveness of spam on our computers, I found that pornography is the most popular type of spam advertisement followed by pharmacy drugs, and then Rolex watches. Spam is successful because of impulse purchases, so it's easy to see why a certain 'someone' feeling awfully lonely might be interested in a 'FREE SEX' spam message.

• Pornographic spam is 280 times as effective as spam advertising drugs in garnering online user 'clicks'.
• Spam messages promoting pornography are 280 times as effective in getting recipients to click on them as messages advertising pharmacy drugs, which are the next most effective type of spam.
• The third most successful variety is spam advertising Rolex watches, 0.0075 percent of which get clicked on, according to an analysis by CipherTrust, a large manufacturer of devices that protect networks from spam and viruses.