Spamming

This article is about unsolicited or undesirable electronic messages. For information specific to email, see Email spam. For other uses, see Spam (disambiguation).
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 2016-05-14. Retrieved 2016-05-01.
  2. ^ "Spam". Merriam-Webster Dictionary (definition & more). 2012-08-31. Archived from the original on 2019-03-23. Retrieved 2013-07-05.
  3. ^ "The Definition of Spam". The Spamhaus Project. Archived from the original on 2012-02-24. Retrieved 2013-09-03.
  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 2020-02-15. Retrieved 2007-10-05.