Spam!AbstractConcern about the proliferation of unsolicited bulk email, commonly referred to as spam, has been steadily increasing. When received in small quantities, spam may annoy recipients, but rarely poses a significant problem. However, some recipients of large quantities of spam find themselves so overwhelmed with unwanted email that it is time-consuming or difficult for them to ferret out their desired correspondence. A variety of technical countermeasures to spam have been proposed: the simplest are already being implemented; some of the more extreme could require dramatic changes to the ways we communicate electronically. In addition, there has been growing support in the US for laws that would restrict the sending of spam. In this article we examine the spam problem and discuss the probable long-term effectiveness of current and proposed technical countermeasures as well as possible regulatory solutions. This article includes three sidebars: A case study, What does spam advertise?, and What you can do about spam. CitationLorrie Faith Cranor and Brian A. LaMacchia. Spam! Communications of the ACM. Vol. 41, No. 8 (Aug. 1998), Pages 74-83. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/280324.280336 Copyright 1998 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Publications Dept, ACM Inc., fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. Full Text |