I still have school and testing...
tis boring...


now sPa/\/\ this thread

I have no school... which is why I am here...

E-mail sPa/\/\, also known as junk e-mail, is a subset of sPa/\/\ that involves nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients by e-mail. A common synonym for sPa/\/\ is unsolicited bulk e-mail (UBE). Definitions of sPa/\/\ usually include the aspects that email is unsolicited and sent in bulk. "UCE" refers specifically to unsolicited commercial e-mail.

E-mail sPa/\/\ has steadily, even exponentially grown since the early 1990s to several billion messages a day. sPa/\/\ has frustrated, confused, and annoyed e-mail users. Laws against sPa/\/\ have been sporadically implemented, with some being opt-out and others requiring opt in e-mail. The total volume of sPa/\/\ (over 100 billion emails per day as of April 2008) has leveled off slightly in recent years, and is no longer growing exponentially. The amount received by most e-mail users has decreased, mostly because of better filtering. About 80% of all sPa/\/\ is sent by fewer than 200 botnets, networks of virus-infected computers. Since the cost of the sPa/\/\ is borne mostly by the recipient, it is effectively postage due advertising.

E-mail addresses are collected from chatrooms, websites, newsgroups, and viruses which harvest users' address books, and are sold to other spammers. Much of sPa/\/\ is sent to invalid e-mail addresses. ISPs have attempted to recover the cost of sPa/\/\ through lawsuits against spammers, although they have been mostly unsuccessful in collecting damages despite winning in court.

Overview

From the beginning of the Internet, sending of junk e-mail has been prohibited,[9] enforced by the Terms of Service/Acceptable Use Policy (ToS/AUP) of internet service providers (ISPs) and peer pressure. Even with a thousand users junk e-mail for advertising is not tenable, and with a million users it is not only impractical,[10] but also expensive.[11] It is estimated that sPa/\/\ cost businesses on the order of $100 billion in 2007.[12] As the scale of the sPa/\/\ problem has grown, ISPs and the public have turned to government for relief from sPa/\/\, which has failed to materialize.[13]

Types of sPa/\/\

sPa/\/\ has several definitions, varying by the source.

    * Unsolicited bulk e-mail (UBE)—unsolicited e-mail, sent in large quantities.
    * Unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE)—this more restrictive definition is used by regulators whose mandate is to regulate commerce, such as the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.
    * Any email message that is fraudulent.[citation needed]
    * Any email message where the sender’s identity is forged, or messages sent though unprotected SMTP servers, unauthorized proxies, or botnets (see Theft of service below).[citation needed]

Spamvertised sites

Many sPa/\/\ e-mails contain URLs to a website or websites. According to a Commtouch report in June 2004, "only five countries are hosting 99.68% of the global spammer websites", of which the foremost is China, hosting 73.58% of all web sites referred to within sPa/\/\.

Most common products advertised

According to information compiled by sPa/\/\-Filter-Review.com, E-mail sPa/\/\ for 2006 can be broken down as follows.

E-Mail sPa/\/\ by Category

Products

13%
Financial

22%
Adult

25%
Scams

7%
Health

10%
Internet

9%
Leisure

6%
Spiritual

5%
Other

5%

Rolex watches and Viagra-type drugs are two common products advertised in sPa/\/\ e-mail.

419 scams
Advance fee fraud sPa/\/\ such as the Nigerian "419" scam may be sent by a single individual from a cyber cafe in a developing country. Organized "sPa/\/\ gangs" operating from Russia or eastern Europe share many features in common with other forms of organized crime, including turf battles and revenge killings.

Phishing

sPa/\/\ is also a medium for fraudsters to scam users to enter personal information on fake Web sites using e-mail forged to look like it is from a bank or other organization such as PayPal. This is known as phishing. Spear-phishing is targeted phishing, using known information about the recipient, such as making it look like it comes from their employer.

Appending

If a marketer has one database containing names, addresses, and telephone numbers of prospective customers, they can pay to have their database matched against a database containing email addresses. If the database contains erroneous information, companies will send out unsolicited commercial email. To protect against this, e-mail should only be sent to users known to have subscribed, and should be verified through a double opt in procedure. Purchasing a list of e-mail addresses that match a list of names is almost guaranteed to create unhappy recipients.

Legality

meh.. head over to wikipedia and read the rest. m bored.

urgle

does the food sPa/\/\ is a junk food?