The progression and effects of Spam.

Based on a comment I made on someone's question about Spam, I felt it might be a little more informative to everyone if I gave a little more detail on the subject.

According to Wikipedia and Google, Spam is defined as the following:

"Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages."

While that may seem vague, it is an accurate definition. What started out as annoying email messages, it has now progressed into areas such as IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channels to actually modifying HTML pages in order to push them high up on search engine relevancy lists.

Spammers typically "shotgun" their messages out randomly, which is why ads on pornographic sites can show up where you work or on your child's computer.

Spam has become a security issue to the point of spreading viruses, worms, Trojans, spyware and phishing attacks. It has also developed into blogspam, which is where all of those comment spams are coming from.

The direct result of all this is the wasted use of computer resources as well as the wasted time we have to give it in order to clean up all of this junk. The game that spammers are playing show up in the form of fake contact information to set up false accounts at other ISPs. They are constantly working to come up with new ways of overriding any filters that are put in place to block their messages.

Let me know if I can be of further assistence on this.

Dave