Why SPAM? Yes, Spam, is the name for that little blue can of processed "meat"
made by Hormel you can find in the grocery store. The meat is junk, which is
fitting, but I’m not sure if that’s the source of the word we’ve grown so fond
of. Actually, the generally accepted derivation for the word is a Monty Python
skit. They had a skit in which a group of Vikings were singing "spam, spam,
spam, spam" so loud and often that it drowned everyone out. In the early
days of the internet, when the net was mostly populated by nerds of the classical
sense, there were very few net surfers who didn’t appreciate Monty Python, so
I guess the word caught on and I can see the correlation.

When we hear the word SPAM, our first thought is unsolicited junk mail. For
most practical purposes, this covers it. But, some have simply defined it as
"unsolicited email". This is an incomplete definition simply because
most of us get emails every day we didn’t directly ask for. It’s simply not
plausible for each of us to give people a call and say "Hey, send me an
email.". It’s silly. Others have said SPAM is email coming from an unknown
source. Again, this is incomplete because people receive emails every day from
people they do not know. If I only accepted emails from people I knew, then
anybody reading this article or visiting PC Mechanic at all could ever email
me. What most people mean when they think of SPAM is simply annoying
email. If they find the email annoying in some fashion, then its SPAM. This
definition gets a little closer, but it still left to the preference and mood
of the recipient and, for this reason, is not a very useful definition. For
example, PC Mechanic sends out a Tip of the Day every day. There are always a
few people who say we are spamming them and they take themselves off the mailing
list. There is nobody on our mailing list who did not directly sign themselves
up for it. Therefore, it not unsolicited
at all, but that particular day they found our Tip of the Day annoying and therefore,
to them, it is SPAM. Again, a very useless definition. How about "unsolicited
bulk email" as a definition? Close, but again there are caveats. If I receive
an email from my bank or some other company who provides a service to me, then
chances are the email is unsolicited. I didn’t ask them to send me emails. But,
at the same time, I have a business relationship with them and therefore it
is reasonable that I would receive occasional emails from them.

Get the point? Determining whether an email is SPAM or not is a gray area and
is, to large degree, in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps the most accurate definition
would be "unethical mass email". Ethics is that effort on each person’s
part to perform the most good for the most number. So, on the reverse side of
this, if you have a mass email which offends the ethical sense or netiquette
of a majority of internet users, it is probably SPAM. Therefore, any email sent
individually to a person is not SPAM; it is not a mass email. But, a commercial
email (one advertising a product or service) can be if it does the following:

• Sent blindly to a large mailing list without any form of targeting.
  Usually, this type of SPAM will be sent to thousands, even millions at a time
  with the expectation that maybe a few dozen will respond to that ad, whether
  accidentally or stupidly. These kinds of emails are not of any interest to probably
  99% of the people receiving them, and are thus unethical.
• Sent with spoofed headers. The email header is a block
  of information appended to the beginning of every email. Think of every email
  as a packet of information. The body of that packet is what you read in your
  email client. The header is generally not seen by you when you read the email
  (some email clients allow you the option to view them), but is useful to the
  network of servers on the internet which are responsible for delivering the
  email to you. The header contains the sender of the message, their return
  address, the subject line, the originating IP address and more. Well, SPAM
  messages often spoof the headers or use invalid headers. The result is an
  email which is untraceable or which looks like it was sent from a place where
  it was not.
• Does not contain an opt-out option. Any kind of mass mailing
  MUST contain a working method of unsubscribing from the mailing list.
• Is not sent on a list requiring double opt-in. A well managed
  mass email list will require double opt-in, meaning after the email address
  is entered, they receive a confirmation message via email which requires them
  to perform yet another action to finally subscribe themselves to the list.
  That action may be to follow a web link or to simply reply. Any other method
  is unethical, not to mention insecure because then anybody could sign anybody
  else up for any mailing list.
• Performs any kind of tracking or other action. Email messages
  are often opened by the recipient without them even knowing anything about
  it. When you click the subject line in your email client, it shows up in the
  preview window. Even if it shows there for less than a second, it counts as
  opening the email. Thus, any email which contains any code which executes
  on the user’s machine, sets a cookie, or otherwise performs any tracking is
  unethical and potential SPAM. It should be noted that the use of tracking
  is ethical if the recipient directly signed up for the list, although such
  tracking should be mentioned in the website’s privacy policy.
• Is Sent using Email Harvesters. An email harvester is a
  software robot which spiders websites across the internet looking for email
  addresses. These email addresses are usually on "Contact Us" pages
  and the like, allowing visitors to legitimately contact the site’s author.
  Harvesters collect these email addresses and saves them in a database, thereby
  allowing the mailing list to be used and re-distributed to others.
• Is Sent using open relay server or unprotected form mail scripts.
  Legitimate emails do not have to hide their identity and usually send through
  a legitimate source. Using an unsecured relay server (sometimes called an injection
  point) or form mail script is unethical.

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