# Email spam Canonical: https://web4.xpay.bi/en/wiki/wp-en-459847/ Language: en Published: 2026-10-29T22:35:59.796Z Updated: 2026-10-29T22:35:59.796Z Email spam, also referred to as junk email, spam mail, or simply spam, refers to unsolicited messages sent in bulk via email. The term originates from a Monty Python sketch, where the name of a canned meat product, "Spam", is used repetitively, mirroring the intrusive nature of unwanted emails. Since the early 1990s, spam has grown significantly, with estimates suggesting that by 2014, i ## Key facts ## Overview Email spam, also referred to as junk email, spam mail, or simply spam, refers to unsolicited messages sent in bulk via email. The term originates from a Monty Python sketch, where the name of a canned meat product, "Spam", is used repetitively, mirroring the intrusive nature of unwanted emails. Since the early 1990s, spam has grown significantly, with estimates suggesting that by 2014, it comprised around 90% of all global email traffic. Spam is a burden for the recipient, who may be required to manage, filter, or delete these unwanted messages. This cost imposed on recipients, without compensation from the sender, makes spam an example of a "negative externality" (a side effect of an activity that affects others who are not involved in the decision). The legal definition and status of spam varies from one jurisdiction to another, but laws and lawsuits have not generally been successful in stemming spam. Most email spam messages are commercial in nature. Whether commercial or not, many are not only annoying as a form of attention theft, but also dangerous because they may contain links that lead to phishing web sites or sites that are hosting malware or include malware as file attachments. Spammers collect email addresses from chat rooms, websites, customer lists, newsgroups, and viruses that harvest users' address books. These collected email addresses are sometimes also sold to other spammers. ## Overview At the beginning of the Internet (the ARPANET), sending of commercial email was prohibited. Gary Thuerk sent the first email spam message in 1978 to 600 people. He was reprimanded and told not to do it again. Now the ban on spam is enforced by the Terms of Service/Acceptable Use Policy (ToS/AUP) of internet service providers (ISPs) and peer pressure. Spam is sent by both otherwise reputable organizations and lesser companies. When spam is sent by otherwise reputable companies it is sometimes referred to as Mainsleaze. Mainsleaze makes up approximately 3% of the spam sent over the internet. ## Spamvertised sites Many spam emails contain URLs to a website or websites. According to a Cyberoam report in 2014, there are an average of 54 billion spam messages sent every day. "Pharmaceutical products (Viagra and the like) jumped up 45% from last quarter's analysis, leading this quarter's spam pack. Emails purporting to offer jobs with fast, easy cash come in at number two, accounting for approximately 15% of all spam email. And, rounding off at number three are spam emails about diet products (such as Garcinia gummi-gutta or Garcinia Cambogia), accounting for approximately 1%." Spam is also a medium for fraudsters to scam users into entering personal information on fake Web sites using emails forged to look like they are from banks or other organizations, such as PayPal. This is known as phishing. Targeted phishing, where known information about the recipient is used to create forged emails, is known as spear-phishing. ## Appending If a marketer has one database containing names, addresses, and telephone numbers of customers, they can pay to have their database matched against an external database containing email addresses. The company then has the means to send email to people who have not requested email, which may include people who have deliberately withheld their email address. ## Image spam Image spam, or image-based spam, is an obfuscation method by which text of the message is stored as a GIF or JPEG image and displayed in the email. This prevents text-based spam filters from detecting and blocking spam messages. Image spam was reportedly used in the mid-2000s to advertise "pump and dump" stocks. Often, image spam contains nonsensical, computer-generated text which simply annoys the reader. However, new technology in some programs tries to read the images by attempting to find text in these images. These programs are not very accurate, and sometimes filter out innocent images of products, such as a box that has words on it. A newer technique, however, is to use an animated GIF image that does not contain clear text in its initial frame, or to contort the shapes of letters in the image (as in CAPTCHA) to avoid detection by optical character recognition tools. ## Blank spam Blank spam is spam lacking a payload advertisement. Often the message body is missing altogether, as well as the subject line. Still, it fits the definition of spam because of its nature as bulk and unsolicited email. Blank spam may be originated in different ways, either intentional or unintentionally: Blank spam can have been sent in a directory harvest attack, a form of dictionary attack for gathering valid addresses from an email service provider. Since the goal in such an attack is to use the bounces to separate invalid addresses from the valid ones, spammers may dispense with most elements of the header and the entire message body, and still accomplish their goals. Blank spam may also occur when a spammer forgets or otherwise fails to add the payload when they set up the spam run. Often blank spam headers appear truncated, suggesting that computer glitches, such as software bugs or other may have contributed to this problem—from poorly written spam software to malfunctioning relay servers, or any problems that may truncate header lines from the message body. Some spam may appear to be blank when in fact it is not. An example of this is the VBS.Davinia.B email worm which propagates through messages that have no subject line and appears blank, when in fact it uses HTML code to download other files. ## Backscatter spam Backscatter is a side-effect of email spam, viruses, and worms. It happens when email servers are misconfigured to send a bogus bounce message to the envelope sender when rejecting or quarantining email (rather than simply rejecting the attempt to send the message). If the sender's address was forged, then the bounce may go to an innocent party. Since these messages were not solicited by the recipients, are substantially similar to each other, and are delivered in bulk quantities, they qualify as unsolicited bulk email or spam. As such, systems that generate email backscatter can end up being listed on various DNSBLs and be in violation of internet service providers' Terms of Service. ## Legal countermeasures If an individual or organisation can identify harm done to them by spam, and identify who sent it; then they may be able to sue for a legal remedy, e.g. on the basis of trespass to chattels. A number of large civil settlements have been won in this way, although others have been mostly unsuccessful in collecting damages. Criminal prosecution of spammers under fraud or computer crime statutes is also common, particularly if they illegally accessed other computers to create botnets, or the emails were phishing or other forms of criminal fraud. Finally, in most countries specific legislation is in place to make certain forms of spamming a criminal offence, as outlined below: ## European Union Article 13 of the European Union Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications (2002/58/EC) provides that the EU member states shall take appropriate measures to ensure that unsolicited communications for the purposes of direct marketing are not allowed either without the consent of the subscribers concerned or in respect of subscribers who do not wish to receive these communications, the choice between these options to be determined by national legislation. ## United Kingdom In the United Kingdom, for example, unsolicited emails cannot be sent to an individual subscriber unless prior permission has been obtained or unless there is a pre-existing commercial relationship between the parties. ## Canada The 2010 Fighting Internet and Wireless Spam Act (which took effect in 2014) is Canadian legislation meant to fight spam. ## Australia The Spam Act 2003, which covers some types of email and phone spam. Penalties are up to 10,000 penalty units, or 2,000 penalty units for a person other than a body corporate. ## Sources - Email spam · Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=459847 Source: Wikipedia contributors — https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=459847&oldid=1378662051 Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Adaptation notice: Reformatted for XPay; the source may be abridged, restructured or translated. Consult the cited revision for the original.