Spam, Monty Python and Fighting Back – Three Ways Organisations are Minimising Spam

Firstly, the answer is no; we’re not talking about that suspicious looking meat product with the bold yellow writing on the packaging that you’re curious about, but not quite curious enough to actually try. However, that type of spam DOES have some relevance to the spam we’re referring to. To save you the time (but perhaps not the headache), here’s a genuine 3-minute history of the origin of electronic spam…

Yes, Monty Python is the originator of the popularisation of the term spam in its digital context, who knew?! No, really… I’m not kidding.

So what does spam actually refer to concerning marketing? It’s distinguishable from legitimate advertising in the fact that it is unsolicited, intrusive and does not appear to offer consumers a choice in opting out nor provide any form of compensation to the receiver.  Spamabuse.net consolidate it nicely but defining spam as, “… 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.” If you’d like to experience a more practical definition, Urban Dictionary has gone another way about defining it (but still rather accurately):

SOURCE:  Urban Dictionary

Spam is an obnoxious and prevalent issue in the digital world. According to Symantec (2010) figures, approximately one billion emails were sent daily to valid email accounts globally – 88% of this global email traffic was considered to be spam. Spam isn’t an innocent behaviour; under current laws, majority of spam activity is considered illegal.

For a more comprehensive explanation of spam and its progression over time, I highly recommend Justin Rao and David Reiley’s (2012) article, “The Economics of Spam”. Within their work, they identify some of the major ways organisations’ have attempted to fight the war against spam. Here are a few of the identified weapons of choice:

1. CAPTCHAs –CAPTCHAs attempt to deny spammers the ability to create a plethora of fake email (or various online) accounts by requiring a text input from users before gaining access to account creation – a task often unachievable by basic bots.

ICYDK, Captcha stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computer and Humans apart. So really, its name is highly self-explanatory for its purpose. While CAPTCHAs are effective against more rudimentary spammers, highly sophisticated spammers have found intricate methods of getting around them, such as baiting humans into actually entering CAPTCHAs on spammer behalves in promise of access to content not requiring the text input.

SOURCE:  http://failblog.cheezburger.com/failbook/tag/captcha
Apparently some CAPTCHA systems have gotten so sneaky; you actually need some sixth sense to detect what the actual letters are. So advanced it’s not only bot-proof, but probably human-proof too. Click here for a list of CAPTCHA fails – trust me, some of them are pretty amusing.

2. Anti-Spam Filtering Techniques. We often witness this in the form of a Junk Folder, where consumer web-based email service providers screen incoming emails. Those which satisfy the suspicion of being spam-orientated are redirected to the junk mail folder, or are rejected entirely. Spammers attempt to slide under detection by inputting text into images, which cannot be identified by some automated screening processes.
3. Blacklisting email servers. This one is the big shut down to spammers, but can also have a negative effect on innocent and legitimate users of the servers. If email administrators realised that users were being bombarded by particular email domains, they are able to blacklist the email domain and therefore any further incoming emails from that service would be automatically denied. The creation and outsourcing of email domain blacklists can serve as a mutually beneficial anti-spam tool for organisations, as lists can be shared and therefore shut down spammers at a faster rate. An example of this is the Spamhaus Block List, which was created by Steve Linford 17 years ago and is responsible for protecting approximately 1.8 billion email inboxes from obnoxious spam!

What’s your experience with spam? Have you ever been a victim to unwanted emails flooding your inbox? Do you have any creative ideas for the war against spammers? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

List of References

Mueller, S. H. (n.d.). What is Spam? Retrieved September 28, 2015, from http://spam.abuse.net/overview/whatisspam.shtml

Reiley, D. H., Rao, J. M. (2012). The economics of spam. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 26(3). 87-110.

Symantec. 2010. Messagelabs Intelligence: 2010. Annual Security Report.