Ban SpamIt is a new day at the office, and workers are getting online to check their electronic mail, only to find that it has been over run by unsolicited junk mail. This mail, more commonly referred to as spam has been around since the beginning of the Internet, and according to a recent article, as the Internet has grown, so has spam (Spam Spam E.
L. ) A recent study by Star Internet, based on the typical number of staff spending ten minutes a day checking their mail, indicates that spam costs companies in the U. K. 472 dollars a year per worker, and on a national scale, spam costs U. K.
firms 4. 6 billion dollars a year (Gold F. A. ). This is just one reason why bulk unsolicited (spam) e-mail is costly, time consuming, and should be banned.
The term spam for unsolicited e-mail is believed to have originated from a Monty Python skit in which the dialogue was drowned out by shouting out the word spam(How to Avoid F. A. ). This is much the way spam drowns out other messages in in-boxes. Although spam is a problem for businesses, it is certainly not limited to them. A large amount of spam mail is targeted at anyone who has an e-mail address, and many adults are therefore concerned at some of the content that is sometimes received with these inconvenient messages.
Some spam messages may contain explicit content, such as subject headers that display sexually explicit words and phrases that may be unsuitable for children who have access to the Internet. Even though spam can contain some sexually explicit material, there are generally twelve spam scams that seem to be popular. According to one article, many spam messages may contain promises of business opportunities, making money scams, work-at-home schemes, health and diet scams, easy money, getting free merchandise, chain letters, getting free merchandise, investment opportunities, cable scrambler kits, guaranteed loans or credit with easy terms, credit repair, and vacation prize promotions (Gardner E. L. ). These are the most popular, but certainly not the only spam scams that are out there today.
There are many ways to receive spam mail, or get on a spammers list. Many times, e-mail addresses that are given out while filling out forms over the Internet end up on a spammers list. According to one article, this is generally because spammers use special harvesting software for retrieving e-mail addresses, and many times there isnt a privacy policy that prevents companies from giving out e-mail addresses to other companies. Another popular way to end up on a spamming list is simply by subscribing to newsletters online (How to Avoid F.
A. )Although spam is generally unwanted by the public, many companies like the idea of spam. According to Dana Gardner, One persons spam is anothers marketing triumph. Many companies see spam as a very easy and cheap way of advertising, and therefore would like to see it around in the future. Steve Whitney, a business development manger at PriceWaterHouseCoopers says, Sometimes there is stuff you want to hear about. Although he later goes on to say, I wish I could filter out the other stuff, but Id still prefer no spam to getting it at all (Spam Has Choicer E.
L. ). There may be those few who dont mind spam or even prefer it, but the majority of the public would still like to see it done away with. In a survey given by the IT Chiefs, 55% said ban spam, 42% said yes to keeping it around, and 3% didnt know (Adshead F. A.
). As you can see from this survey, over half of the majority despises spam, and there are many good reasons why. The public, for a number of different reasons, despises spam. Jodie Bernstein, the bureau director at the FTCs Bureau of Consumer Protection in Washington says, Spam is a problem for practically everyone with a computer. Its annoying, it slows down the e-mail system and a lot of it is fraudulent (Gardner E. L.
). According to one article, spam can distract people from genuine messages that may be important, it can increase peoples telephone bills by having to spend more time online sifting through unsolicited mail, and it can use up valuable storage space on computers. Some
