Spamming

An email inbox containing a large amount of spam messages

Spamming is the use of messaging systems to send multiple unsolicited messages (spam) to large numbers of recipients for the purpose of commercial advertising, non-commercial proselytizing, or any prohibited purpose (especially phishing), or simply repeatedly sending the same message to the same user. While the most widely recognized form of spam is email spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, online classified ads spam, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet forum spam, junk fax transmissions, social spam, spam mobile apps,[1] television advertising and file sharing spam. It is named after Spam, a luncheon meat, by way of a Monty Python sketch about a restaurant that has Spam in almost every dish in which Vikings annoyingly sing "Spam" repeatedly.[2]

Spamming remains economically viable because advertisers have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists, servers, infrastructures, IP ranges, and domain names, and it is difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings. The costs, such as lost productivity and fraud, are borne by the public and by Internet service providers, which have added extra capacity to cope with the volume. Spamming has been the subject of legislation in many jurisdictions.[3]

A person who creates spam is called a spammer.[4]

  1. ^ "Developer Policy Center – Intellectual Property, Deception, and Spam". play.google.com. Archived from the original on 14 May 2016. Retrieved 1 May 2016.
  2. ^ "Spam". Merriam-Webster Dictionary (definition & more). 31 August 2012. Archived from the original on 23 March 2019. Retrieved 5 July 2013.
  3. ^ "The Definition of Spam". The Spamhaus Project. Archived from the original on 24 February 2012. Retrieved 3 September 2013.
  4. ^ Gyöngyi, Zoltan; Garcia-Molina, Hector (2005). "Web spam taxonomy" (PDF). Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web (AIRWeb), 2005 in The 14th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2005) May 10, (Tue) – 14 (Sat), 2005, Nippon Convention Center (Makuhari Messe), Chiba, Japan. New York, NY: ACM Press. ISBN 978-1-59593-046-0. Archived (PDF) from the original on 15 February 2020. Retrieved 5 October 2007.

Developed by StudentB