hiddentiger24
Newcomer
3 messages
joined Mar 2008
Here’s my take:
According to Wikipedia, spam is essentially any unsolicited mass communication. This includes those endless advertisements for products you never asked about, email notifications for topics you didn't subscribe to, or even fake private messages designed to drive you toward adult content sites. In short, if it’s being blasted out to a crowd and you didn't ask for it, it counts as spam.
There is a pretty troubling statistic floating around suggesting that three-quarters of all emails on the internet are actually spam. I guess this comes down to the simple economics of scale. It has become incredibly cheap and easy to blast out millions of emails at once; even if only a tiny fraction of those recipients click a link or buy a product, it's enough to make the whole operation profitable for the sender. Because the sheer volume of this junk drives up server maintenance costs and makes email much less useful for everyone else, major US internet service providers have started cracking down hard on proven distributors. As a result, the spam industry seems to be moving away from more obvious methods and leaning further into illicit distribution tactics.
I think we’ve all seen those classic messages asking us to forward an email to our entire contact list, or the ones promising we can get rich if we just wire them $10. These kinds of messages are everywhere, and they're usually categorized as scams or hoaxes.
