Spam has been around as long as the Internet. Indeed, if one looks at the vast quantities of unsolicited snail (postal) mail, fax spam, and telemarketing (phone spam) that one is exposed to, one begins to appreciate that USE is not an Internet phenomenon; it is a social one.

Spam is a particular problem on the Internet because:

Unlike traditional postal spam, Internet users often pay to receive the unwanted material. This is also true for fax spam, but fax spam cannot be generated in the quantity that email spam can be since only one number can be dialed at a time. Thus, email spam on the Internet is to be expected since we see the same behavior elsewhere in society,^[27] but it is a particular problem because elsewhere it does not cause the recipient to undergo such great expense for something that they have not requested and do not want.

Several countries and some states have specific laws against fax spam and are now experimenting with laws to combat email spam in a similar manner. These efforts will need to wait for case law and legal precedent to determine their usefulness.

Spam on the Internet is hard to control because the Internet mail system was built in and for a cooperative environment. It did not occur to the original designers of the system that people would so badly abuse it. The SMTP protocol was designed specifically to ensure that anyone on the system could send a message to anyone else. Once spammers start collecting everyone’s email addresses, the opportunity for abuse is present.

Spammers generally collect large numbers of email addresses from Usenet newsgroups, mailing lists, and sometimes by making use of customer lists that include email addresses. Commercial distributions of these collected lists of addresses are sold by the collectors. Unscrupulous programmers have created tools that use these lists to send mail to millions of people at a time. The combination of these two things, recipient list and bulk emailer, is all a spammer needs to hang a shingle and open shop.

Many people have attempted to solve the problem of spam since the commercialization of the Internet occurred in 1994. Individually, they have all failed, which in itself is a twisted testament to the survivability and robustness of the Internet as a distributed system. No one solution can be found that will stop spam. Taken together, however, these approaches have begun to have a real impact on the flood of spam.

The remainder of this chapter categorizes these approaches. Some anti-spam actions are taken by the recipient of spam, some by service providers, and others by governments. It takes the cooperation of all of these people to reduce the spam menace. In general:

Unfortunately, we have not yet determined as a society how to deal with spam legislatively. Indeed, since the Internet reaches into most countries in the world, it is not yet clear that an individual country’s laws will have any effect other than locally. We are cursed, it would seem, to “live in interesting times.”