What is Spam?

Spam has been defined as sending multiple copies of unsolicited commercial or bulk email to unsuspecting people who do not want it. Most modern spam is characterized by get rich quick schemes, adult and sex oriented messages, pharmaceuticals, erection aids, real estate, phishing scams, chain letters and a multitude of other annoying messages. Ironically, what may be spam to one person may not be spam to another person. One key aspect of spam is that is very inexpensive to send. This key fact has made it so prevalent. Since anyone can send it for almost free there is no barriers to sending it. Direct mail at least has postage prices which add up very fast. With email based spam, if even one person buys a product via a spam mail or signs up for a pay website, it usually pays for the small costs of sending the messages. In fact most of the time the people sending spam have hijacked other people's servers and are wasting their bandwidth and server processing cycles.