What is Email spam?

Email spam commonly known as junk e-mail, is a part of spam that involves nearly similar messages sent to numerous recipients by e-mail. It is commonly known as Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE). Spam definitions usually include the aspects that email is unsolicited and sent in bulk. UCE refers to Unsolicited Commercial Email.

It has exponentially grown from the early 1990s to nearly about 100 billion messages a day. It has caused quite a lot of annoyance, confusion, and frustration among many email users. The total number of spam has leveled off recently with the growth not being exponential. Better filtering techniques have caused a lot of reduction for spam received. Botnets, which are a network of compromised computers, are used to send about 80% of the spam in the world. The cost of the spam is mostly born by the recipient.

Email addresses are collected from chat rooms, newsgroups, websites, and viruses, which harvest user’s address books, and are sold to other spammers. Much of the spam is directed to invalid e-mail addresses. ISPs, which have won legal battles over the spammers, haven’t been able to recover the damages caused to them though. Spam averages 94% of all email sent in the world today.