Why I hate spam
(and email chain letters and pyramid schemes and virus warnings and...)
<rant mode=on>
So why do I hate spam? It's a matter of mere seconds to click 'delete' and ignore it, right? Well, no.
Bandwidth
For those who don't know, bandwidth is, very simply put, the amount of information that can be transmitted along a given path. The more bandwidth you have, the faster you can download images and files - because more information can be sent in a given amount of time.
An analogy: think of the pipes that bring drinking water into your house. There are huge pipes that can carry enormous amounts of water into your community pumping station (ISP). These would be the T1, T3, fiber optics, and other very high speed, high bandwidth lines. From the pumping station, the water goes into smaller pipes into your house, and then into your tap. These would be the phone lines and the modem in your computer.
The water flowing through these pipes is all the legit stuff: http requests, email, downloads. There is a maximum flow rate for all this 'water', related to the diameter of the pipe.
Spam is mineral oil. Somewhere along the water pipe, a spammer dumps in a lot of mineral oil. Now, mineral oil and water don't mix - spam won't corrupt your email - but it takes up space in your water line. Imagine so much mineral oil being dumped into the water lines that there is significantly less space available for the water to be moved around. The *total* amount of material moved is the same as without the mineral oil, but the amount of water moved is way lower - ie, the water flows more slowly. This is an issue even on the huge pipelines that move 'water' across the country, not just the local, smaller pipes.
Cost
Laying those pipes costs money, which the ISP's and telcos get back by charging subscriber fees. Maintaining the computers that tell the information where to go costs money -- same thing. A spammer clicks one button - 'send' - to spam 10,000 people, but the poor server has to send out 10,000 copies of that email. When you have thousands of spammers sending out millions of messages, you have a lot of computer time and bandwidth used up that could be better used to transfer files faster - such as the pictures on that other web page you're looking at. You know the one, don't try to hide it. ;-)
A lot of home users don't notice this slowdown because of the vast difference between their connection speed and the speed the internet's backbone operates at. If you have a 56K modem, that means you can move a maximum of 56,000 bits of information per second. That's *bits*, not bytes - a byte is, for example, one letter in this rant, and is composed of 8 bits. A T1 line (one of the slowest of the high-bandwidth lines) runs at a maximum of 1.5M, or 1,500,000 bits per second. If you're getting less than 56K on your modem, it could be due to any number of things: an inferior phone line, a slow ISP, a slow server sending you the file - or a clogged internet. Most people don't even notice what speed their connection is unless they're downloading something big.
So the excessively high server and internet loads caused by spam costs the ISP's and the telcos money. You, the subscriber, pay for this in higher connection costs.
Email chain letters and Pyramid schemes
Remember those letters that said, send one dollar to the person at the top of the list, add your name to the bottom and remove her name, and send it out to ten of your friends within one week and in a little over a month the money will start pouring in? That's a pyramid scheme/chain letter. Now, with the growing popularity of the internet, the method of transmission has changed but the basic message remains the same. They're even more virulent now that you can just copy and paste the message instead of having to copy it out, and whoever writes these things knows it. Instead of '10 friends', it's now '100 message boards' or '100 people you know'. Apart from that, the basic message, including the threats of bad luck if you break the chain, are the same. They are spam. More on threats below.
Virus warnings/virus threats
These are particularly nasty strains of the chain letter because they play on the general public's ignorance of how computers *really* work (as opposed to the user interface - the buttons you click and so on).
A typical virus warning goes something like: Warning! There is a virus going around called [insert name here]. If you get a message with the subject line [insert subject line here] DO NOT OPEN IT! Simply by reading the message, your computer will be infected with the virus. It will cause your computer to [insert effects on computer, data, programs, your VCR, your refrigerator, and any other majour appliance you feel like including <g>]. Pass this on to all your friends to warn them!
A typical virus threat goes something like: By reading this email you have just been infected with [insert name here]. The virus will activate and [insert effects here] your computer *unless* you forward this email to [insert number] of your friends!
The details may change, but the basic message is the same. There are several variations on this that are more benign in nature but are still spam, such as the 'free computer from IBM' that I just got recently. This claims that if you forward the message to 10 friends, your email is entered in a database. If those friends *all* forward the message to 10 friends, they will contact you by email to arrange for delivery of your new free computer.
So how do you know if a virus warning is a scam (as above) or real (as in 'Melissa', recently)? Company names (such as IBM, above) or senders does not mean it's real. Spammers can 'cook' the email header - the information that tells who sent it, what server it was sent by, and what time - so that it displays false information. The easiest thing is to remember one simple fact that is often overlooked when teaching people about computers: email is plain text. It is not a program, or a script, or a macro, or anything that can affect your computer in any way. If there is an attachment, such as a .zip or .exe file and you open *that*, there may be a virus lurking there. If the email contains a script and you run it through a script interpreter, there may be a virus - although that assumes you *have* a script interpreter and specifically run the email through it. If there is an attachment such as a MS Word (.doc) file and you open it, it may contain macros (mini programs) that can make Word do odd things. 'Melissa' was one such virus.
If an email claims to be able to do something simply by being opened, or claims to have 'special encoding' to allow it to report back somewhere, it's a scam. Email can't do that. UPDATE: If you're running a certain version of outlook with the security options set to a certain setting, it can. This is because outlook will render an HTML-formatted email - including any malicious scripts embedded in the code. This only affects outlook from what I've heard, and takes advantage of a security hole in Microsoft's 'ActiveX' multimedia components.
These can be prevented by not running programs that someone emails you unless you were expecting them and asked for them from someone you trust, and disabling macros in MS Word. This is, of course, assuming you use Windows. A windows program won't run on a mac, or unix, or any other operating systems without a few contortions, and even then it's iffy - making it awfully hard for a mac user to be infected with a windows virus.
Conclusion
Spam is more than just the few things I've mentioned above. There are also get-rich-quick offers, sales promotions, porno messages and others. A good source of information on email scams, viruses, and chain letters is at CIAC (Computer Incident Advisory Capability). They have listed the text of some scams, a little bit of a history of email chain letters, and a good breakdown of how to recognise them. They also have a list of known viruses and links to other organisations that maintain more up-to-date lists.
<rant mode=off>
