Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
sending spam. Although this does not protect you against
new spamgenerating sites, it may reduce spam from com
mon sources; that is, until they move to new sites.
Over the long term, to reduce the amount of spam received, in
dividuals can be careful in posting email addresses, giving those ad
dresses to others, and handling spam. Of course, a main motivation
for sending spam in the first place is to make money through sales
or other business practices. From this standpoint, the best longterm
attack against spammers is to carefully avoid buying goods from
folks that distribute spam. You may find spam annoying and com
plain to various Internet groups, but if you buy those products, then
you are providing direct financial encouragement for continued
spamming.
Although we might hope that laws could help control spam, this
approach has several practical difficulties:
Message headers
: Message headers can be faked, so it can be
extremely difficult to determine exactly who sent spam in the
first place. A message may indicate it came from one source,
but it might actually have come from another—even a com
petitor. To enforce laws, one must know who to charge with
a violation, and the identification of email senders can be
difficult.
Subcontractors
: When a company begins an advertising cam
paign, it may contract with a second party to run specific ads.
That company may subcontract specific parts to third parties,
and so forth. At some point, a subcontractor may begin an
automated campaign using spam, but this may be quite differ
ent from the intentions of the original company. Further, be
cause spam usually is generated through independent com
puter programs, spam can be tricky to stop once the
programs begin. With such an array of companies engaged in
advertising, it turns out that the original company often loses
control of its advertising campaign. It may tell its immediate
subcontractor(s) to avoid spam or to stop a current spam
campaign, but it can be difficult to reach the actual subcon
tractor sending out the email!
