So how did the use of the word spam come to be asscociated with unsolicted email? To answer this question, we need to go back three decades to the time when British comedy was funny - in my opinion - and to Monty Python's Flying Circus, a TV show my father watched and a show of which my grandfather strongly disapproved. Monty Python's Flying Circus was a half-hour television series of interconnected and somewhat abstract comedy skits. In one of these skits, for reasons best known to the group of Oxford graduates writing the scripts, a group of Vikings sitting in the corner of a pub start chanting "spam spam spam spam, spam spam spam spam..." to the annoyance (ahem, ahem) of the other customers, and then launched into the Spam Song. This, at least, is how the term spam came to mean something monotonous, unsolicited, inappropriate, and unwanted.

There is some disagreement out there about exactly what constitutes spam, disagreement amongst users and law-makers. Some people consider spam to be essentially anything received via the Internet which is unsolicted. In this broadest (too broad in our view) definition, a pop-up advertisement for example could fall into the category of spam. A more sensible definition of spamming is the use of software to non-manually flood a system or database with unwanted data. This may be done for a number of reasons: to advertise something, to crash a system, or just simply to be annoying. More recently, when the term spam is used without qualification it is generally assumed to be refering to either Unsolicted Commercial Email (UCE), or Unsolicted Bulk Email (UBE). The school of thought using the latter term argue that the problem is not the privacy of the individual Interent user or the sancitiy of your little inbox, but the health and future of the system itself. As we shall see below, the real problem with spam is not the content of the email but the way the email is sent - in bulk - although we will show how the two issues are related. But first, let's go back to the earlist uses of spam.

The earliest uses of spam, which takes us back to the Dark Ages of the early 1990's, infact had nothing to do with email. The concept of spamming, before the term spam was being used, began in the earliest forms of chatrooms, refered to as MUD (multi-user dungeons). Malicious users would use software to flood the MUD session with text or objects they had created, often to the extent of crashing the remote host. It is also suggested that one of the popular items used to flood the chat session was the lyrics of the Monty Python Spam Song. Whether this is true or not, the use of the term spam was beginning to be used to describe this type of behavior. In 1994, the most famous early form of spam was concocted by two lawyers from Phoenix named Canter and Siegel who posted an add on the world's largest online conferencing system, called USENET, which reached several thousand newsgroups. This type of activity soon caught on and use of the term spam consequently became popular.

Soon after, as email became increasingly widespread, the use of software to send bulk advertising spread to email and today the most common use of the term spam is used to refer to UCE.

We all hate spam. Probably even the spammers hate it, when they get it. I have email addresses all over my websites and I receive one or two hundred spam emails every day. I swear to God, I receive twenty emails a day asking me if I'd like to have a bigger penis. And I'm not alone, of course. This deluge of unwanted email costs us time, invades our privacy, brings viruses into our computers, and puts us at constant risk of missing the important career-altering emails. But enough ranting. As mentioned above, the problem of spam is not about me, or you, or the little old lady in Stokey West Virginia who gets two pornography-promoting spam emails a day and thinks it's disgusting. The problem of spam is about the Internet, the entire system. The real issue about spam is two-fold. On the one hand, the sheer quantity of spam is overloading ISPs - AOL for example gets millions and millions of the things every day and are beginning to make serious efforts to carck down - and web servers which are constantly being hacked into by spammers wishing to use someone else's resources. This also means that server administrators are constantly having to update and patch servers. All in all, this means higher costs for the user. On the other hand, this breach of privacy and security makes people less willing to reveal their email addresses, less willing to participate, and this not only damages the e-economy but also restricts innovation as it interferes with the end-to-end principle of sharing and development which has enabled the Internet to get as far as it has in so short a time.

Since so many people are spamming, it does beg the question of how effective it is. I must admit I've considered it, but never done it and never will. There doesn't seem to be an obvious answer to this, a bit like trying to get stats on drug users and prostitution. If people do it with such enthusiasm, it almost has to work to some extent. Certainly it is an extremely cheap way of delivering bulk-advertising, and - let's face it - who among us has never responded to a spam email? I certainly have, but it was - obviously - something that was correctly targeted at me, and this is the point. I wouldn't mind receiving UCEs if they were relevant specifically to me, and certainly if only carefully targeted spam was sent then it would not be such a major issue for ISPs and web server administrators. This, therefore, is where I take issue with those who argue that it's not the content of the email which is the issue. I take the point that the main issue is the bulk sending aspect, but certain subject matter is assumed to be of interest to larger numbers of people. Put it this way, I am a man sitting at a computer, therefore it is safe to assume that I need printer cartridges, a bigger penis, and the latest in adult visuals. So it seems to me that the two sides of the coin are connected. Yes, it's the bulk aspect of spam which is the real issue, but certain subjects imply bigger bulk. Moreover, the less spam I get the more chance I might actually look at some of it and that would make bulk email advertising more effective for the spammers. This would all be achieved if we could prohibit spam related to sex, pornography or computers. But now back to the real world.

Like the attempted ammendments to the Wire Law in relation to online gambling, early attempts to regulate spam by the US government were unsuccessful attempts to amend already exisiting laws to bring them up-to-date with the existence of the Internet. Congressman Smith's Netizen's Protection Act in 1998 was a failed attempt to amend the anti-junk-fax law. (This is an excellent example of how trying to ammend existing legislation just isn't going to work because the Internet medium is unique. In this case, fax junk costs the recipient in paper and ink whereas spam email costs the recipient virtually nothing, at least directly.) Five years later, the Bush administation finally have an anti-spam bill passed which will come into effect in a few days, January 1 2004. The Can Spam Act, which goes less far than already existing laws in several US states, essentially means that spammers can still do their dirty deed as long as they use a truthful return email address in the header, include an opt-out option, and do not use hijacked computers or open relays to send the emails. The penalty for breaking this code of spamming is imprisonment for up to one year. Since this law does nothing to attack the real issues of spamming as outlined above, and only really tries to make spam emails more truthful and give people supposedly more freedom of choice, it appears to be really only a political move to make US Internet users feel that the government cares about their clogged up inboxes. This may even backfire and result in more UCEs. In the past, spammers have often used a bogus opt-out option, not to allow people to opt out but rather to trick them into confirming their email address. Many spam programs take an ISP domain name and randoming make up emails addresses in the hope that some or many of them will be real addresses and end up in someone's inbox. If you click the bogus opt-out link, that confirms your email address as real which a sure-fire way of getting your email address listed on a spam CD of genuine email addresses which can be sold to would-be spammers. If, as a result of this new law, naive users think that the opt-out option is genuine when it isn't, the number of confirmed email addresses available to spammers may rise.

The one and only conclusion of the last section of this article is that no government law is going to be able to fight spam no matter how noble its intentions. At least not until we live in a Minority Report kind of world. There have been non-legal suggestions on how to clean up spam pollution, such as the somewhat far-fetched (but, who knows?) idea of e-stamps which give the receiver of an email the option of claiming funds. However, for now at least, if the spam in your inbox is a major concern to you, then it's up to you to do something about it yourself. Here are a few quick tips on how to go about this:

1) Whitelist - Every email client these days has email filtering. You can filter in a number of ways. Filtering by subject or email content is ineffective and will cause you to lose wanted email. Blacklisting is also futile as spammers use false headers and new spammers are spawned every day. The best way to filter is to create a second inbox (call it Good Inbox, or something), and filter - by email address - all the email you want to that folder. I personally work on the Internet, have numerous clients, several websites of my own, a few friends, and family. The total number of email addresses of people I know I want email from only comes to about twenty or so at most, so it's not a major endeavor to create a whitelist.

2) Webmail - Webmail programs such as Yahoo! and Hotmail have effective built-in spam filtering programs. If you have to give your email address out to sign up for stuff you're not sure of, open yourself one of these accounts and use that address. Also, if you have a lot of spam coming into you regular email address at your local ISP, you could login to your account and have your email from your ISP redirected to your webmail account.

3) Anti-spam software - There are many spam programs available, as we all know from the amount of spam email we receive advertising anti-spam software! We would recommend SpamPal.

4) Keep your email address as secret as posible- Guard your email address jealously and only hand it out with care. Don't be paranoid, but be careful. In particular, if you have a website, use a contact form rather than a mailto link which exposes your address and leave your address out of the html header. Spammers spider the Net and suck up (harvest) any email address they can find. You might also want to try using an unusual email address for your contact form rather than info@yourdomain.com and have all other email which is sent to that domain blackholed. Ask your server admin if you don't know how.

The Internet is all about choice and freedom, one of the shining lights in a generally dark age of big-brother controlled media and television indocrination. Spam is evil, but it's not the greatest evil facing humanity and it's not even the greatest evil facing the Internet. It would be a mistake, in our view, to look to the government to try to regulate the Internet when the Interent is built on the freedom of individual cooperation. Freedom means freedom for all, and that includes both UNIX programmerss and idiots who can think no deeper than "let's try this." Of course, ultimately, should we be forced to take the most extreme view, we could say: if you don't like it then don't turn it on.

Good luck to us all fighting spam, and down with the spammers!