what is spam?

spam is a form of network abuse whereby one tries to force feed a (usually commercial) message to as many people as possible...

by force feed i mean that the spammer puts the message where people don't want it and can't easily ignore it - often they have to do something about it to get rid of it...

reaching as many people as possible is achieved either by sending the message many times to many people (such as with email spam) or broadcasting it in such a way that a single instance of the message will be seen by many people (such as with usenet spam) or both...

it may seem like this description isn't doing spam justice, that spam's impact is larger than what is implied here, that a message you don't want to see is a minor annoyance (like commercials on tv) in comparison to spam... well multiply that minor annoyance by 100 (or more)... a single spammed message really doesn't have a lot of impact and if we only got a single spam every now and then we wouldn't really be all that concerned about it... the problem with spam doesn't come from the nature of spam but rather from the sheer unrelenting volume of spammed messages... one popular statistic (at the time of writing) states that spam accounts for 85% of all email traffic - that's a lot of garbage to wade through to get useful content out of your email...

spamming can be done over any network that humans communicate (in some fashion) over such as email (conventional spam), usenet (usenet spam), instant messaging (spim), blogs (splogs), blog comments (comment spam), or even p2p networks...

[see this article on spam etymology for details on the origin of the term]

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