The term “spam” refers to unsolicited commercial email (UCE) or unsolicited bulk email (UBE). It is flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it. It is also referred as junk email. Unsolicited email mostly contains advertisements for services or products. However most of the spams are from marketers or user who are trying to deceive the users.
The most commonly seen spam includes the following :
❖ Phishing scams, a very popular and dangerous form of email fraud
❖ Foreign bank scams or advance fee fraud schemes
❖ Other “Get Rich Quick” or “Make Money Fast” (MMF) schemes
❖ Quack health products and remedies
Spam emails is not only unwanted, it clogs your email accounts and uses unnecessary server space. This creates burden on servers in the businesses. Since Internet is a public platform, it is never possible to completely stop the Spam email. However precaution can be taken while looking at an unknown email addresses. Most of the email hosts can identify such users and help filter them.
Spam costs the sender very little to send -- most of the costs are paid for by the recipient or the carriers rather than by the sender. It is because of these additional costs that most of the hosts are very keen that users use spam filters as well as report spams so they can be stopped.
