Spam: What's So Bad About It?

"Spam", in Internet parlance, used to mean "an article posted to too many Usenet newsgroups, one at a time". Nowadays, though, it generally refers to unsolicited commercial email, sent in bulk, with no regard whatsoever for targeting. For instance, ads for services available only in the United States may be sent to email addresses of people in Canada... or Germany... or Hong Kong. Furthermore, ads may be sent to people who, even if they were nearby, would have zero interest in the product or service advertised, may find it downright offensive, or it may be outright illegal.

(In fact, most spam seems to consist of minor variations on the classic Pyramid Scam -- "send a dollar to each of these five names, add your name at the top, drop the last one, and distribute the list as widely as you can". Most of the rest is ads for pornographic web pages or chat lines (which are illegal for minors), and many of these ads go to minors or people in locations where such things are illegal.)

Why do the spammers aim so poorly? Put bluntly, it's because they don't have to pay for it! Telemarketers must pay for their phone calls. Junk postal mailers must pay for a bulk permit and each piece. But for email, once one has an account at all (which is generally very cheap), each piece of email one sends is generally free -- and there are programs to blast out millions of emails at the push of a button.

Of course, it isn't really free. Someone has to bear the cost of the transmission, and then the storage at the destination. Who pays? YOU PAY, whether you want to or not!

It is the cooperative nature of Internet, that each system on it will use its resources to accept and forward mail. Spammers abuse this by soaking up, for free, the transmission "bandwidth" of other companies, and their disk space to store the messages. Most of the cost of an email message is in fact borne by the receiver, and almost all the rest by any sites between the source and destination. (You may think it's small potatoes, and it is, per person -- but imagine having just one penny for every person on the Internet. That's a LOT of money! There's also the unquantifiable cost of your time and annoyance, and how much longer it takes to find your legitimate mail after wading through a ton of spam.)

A (very) few spammers will deliver the mail directly, but most "bounce" it off a third party, in something known as "relay rape". They dump the large load upon some hapless innocent, who must then use HIS resources to distribute it out to the destinations. Often, this is in such high volume that the third party can't handle it, and his system is stopped, and frequently damaged.

To top it off, the origin information is almost always faked (to avoid angry replies). Often it points at an innocent person, frequently to "frame" someone who had the nerve to complain to them earlier.

Spammers often claim that their method is just like bulk postal mail. This is only half true. Imagine bulk postal mail that:

• Usually has no valid-looking return address, having instead an obscene street name, an American "zip" code on a Canadian city, or no usable postal information at all, perhaps simply marked "anonymous".

• Most of the rest of the time, has a return address that IS invalid even if it doesn't look so -- and you have to pay postage AGAIN when the postal service sends your reply back to you after delivery fails.

• Sometimes has a valid return address, but it is usually that of an innocent person being framed! His mailbox winds up being broken by the weight and bulk of all the replies.

• Promises to take you off their list if you ask them... but if you do so (and if the return address happens, for once, to be valid and actually belong to them), they instead mark your address as validated, send you all the more such mail, and sell your address to other such mailers. Of course, even if they make no such promise, they will do the same thing with any address that complains.

• Often arrives in an envelope falsely marked as though it is from a high priority sender, such as a friend or relative of yours, a government agency, your employer, etc.

• Often arrives falsely marked as something you asked for (even if it is physically impossible for you to have asked for it).

• Is usually for outright scams, minor variations on the classic Pyramid Scheme. ("Send one dollar to each address on this list. Add your own at the top. Remove the last one. Send the list to every address you can get your hands on.") Sometimes they are disguised as MLMs (Multi Level Marketing) schemes, which are sometimes legitimate, but generally overhyped.

• Most of the rest of the time, is for materials offensive to the recipient, if not outright illegal for that recipient to receive (being a minor, or living in a place where the material is illegal).

• Most of the remaining time, is for fraudulent products, such as cures for everything from colds to cancer to AIDS, laundry detergent replacements that work on quantum mechanics and last for years, etc.

• Most of what little is left, is for bulk mailing tools, including ways to alter the postmarks so as to make the origin untraceable (a blatant admission that they know that what they are doing is wrong).

• Is otherwise probably of zero interest to you anyway, such as the spam I recently received for ice rink management products.

• Is frequently for products or services absolutely useless to anyone outside a small area far away from you.

And now the parts that make it really evil, not just annoying:

• Arrives postage due.

• Cannot be refused -- i.e., you must pay the due postage, and the mail must be put in your mailbox.

• Is frequently sent in sufficient volume to break the axles of the postal trucks, and destroy the bridges they (try to) drive over, and overflow (or even break) your mailbox. (People who depend on those bridges are stranded. Mail from your friends, family, and business associates, cannot be received, and must be sent back. Postal prices rise to cover the costs of more and stronger trucks. Taxes rise to cover the costs of new and stronger bridges.)

• If you try to do the same back to them (or anything else analogous, such as repeatedly dialing a toll-free phone number they may have included), so as to disrupt THEIR business, that is already a crime (denial of service, harassment, etc.) -- while the "service" they are rendering you is not (yet) universally recognized as the theft that it truly is. (It is recognized as such in some states and countries, and there is legislation pending in the U.S. Congress, and many further states, to outlaw or at least heavily regulate it.)

So, don't be fooled into thinking that they're just honest businessmen exercising their freedom of speech. (Besides which, the Supreme Court has long held that commercials are not protected speech.) They are thieving lying scum. Don't stop fighting them. And above all, certainly don't join their ranks.