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Spam: It Isn’t Just E-Mail Anymore Essay

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Spam: It Isn’t Just E-Mail Anymore

Introduction

The digital information age has most certainly changed the face of our world. No matter where one looks, the effects of technological evolution can be seen. As recent as ten years ago, merchant companies were accustomed to using mass mailings, ad campaigns, and television commercials as their main form of advertising. Now, with e-commerce flourishing as strongly as ever over the Internet, these same merchants have a more powerful medium to utilize in advertising their products. In theory, there is nothing wrong with advertising fairly, honestly, and with the sole intent of selling products. Today, many of the advertisements on the Internet are not geared towards selling …show more content…

(BritainUsa.com) The rationale is simply this: not everybody wants to have their e-mail boxes bombarded with electronic ads for sexual enhancement drugs or get-rich-quick schemes. The United States has actually implemented rules such that e-mail messages must have a valid subject line in order to be sent as an advertisement message to a consumer. It is for this very reason that I, along with many other American citizens feel that e-mail advertising has lost its value in the marketplace. American and British policies seem to be in accordance with this sentiment. The world’s software industry has made many developments in creating software to help filter out spam e-mails from consumers’ mailboxes. This is a direct indicator of a problem being present. If time and money is being spent in developing proactive solutions to dealing with spam e-mails, there is an obvious supply of consumers who want to have spam e-mails reduced in their lives. Spam e-mail not only consumes the e-mail resources, but it takes the consumers’ time and energy in order to either reply to or erase the messages that are always flooding in. Contrarily, it costs the spammers nothing to send 10 messages, 10,000 messages, or 100,000,000 messages. Talk about unfairness…

This chart reflects this problem by capturing some data on some of AT&T’s and Lucent’s networks: (Cranor & LaMacchia)

So American

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