Word: spam
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...Spam hardly needs an introduction. Anyone with an e-mail account knows the acute frustration of being inundated with offers of pills from virtual pharmacists, financial propositions from Nigerian princes and pictures for fetish sites that really, really shouldn't exist. Spam has even gone beyond e-mail: like kudzu, it adapts to clog whatever online inbox you might choose. On Oct. 30, the social-networking site Facebook won a $711 million judgment against the self-proclaimed "Spam King" Sanford Wallace. Wallace, a professional e-mail marketer from New Hampshire who also likes to be called Spamford, used ill-gotten...
...Though it wasn't called spam until the 1980s - the term comes from a Monty Python sketch set in a cafeteria, where a crowd of Vikings drowns out the rest of conversation by repeatedly singing the name of the unpopular processed meat - the first unsolicited messages came over the wires as early as 1864, when telegraph lines were used to send dubious investment offers to wealthy Americans. The first modern spam was sent on ARPANET, the military computer network that preceded the Internet. In 1978, a man named Gary Turk sent an e-mail solicitation to 400 people, advertising...
...spam comprises the vast majority of e-mail messages sent - 78% of the 210 billion e-mails sent each day, according to one estimate. And 93 billion of these manage to get past the technical defenses like spam filters and blacklists. E-mail programs have gotten smarter, but spammers stay one step ahead, using disposable e-mail addresses and sending messages from farms of different computers around the world to avoid being blocked. The garbled text spammers load their messages with to get past e-mail filters sometimes approaches poetry: sites like spampoetry.org chronicle lines like "Confirm you won fund...
...Great. Spam filtering sites think Gmail is spam. Can you say ‘ironic?...
...about two third party companies that are not really meeting eye to eye on what the nature of their particular service is,” Selsby said. “So it's kind of ironic, but the same thing that Gmail did to @College, SpamHouse [one of the Spam-filtering sites in question] did to Gmail...