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I watched a program the other night in which they tracked down an ‘evil spammer’ to his home town and confronted him.  The way the show described the guy you would have thought he was someone nefarious.  But I started thinking, what is spam and who is more responsible?  The spammer or the spammee?

A couple thoughts were racing through my mind as I watched this show.  First was what constitutes spam?  Sure I know the web definition, but what really counts as spam.

The second question was – who is responsible?  The spammer who sent the unsolicited email, or the person who received it?

But to the first question – what constitutes spam?

According to many online sources spam is essentially unsolicited email.  But my question is:  Why is the term “spam” limited to email?  What if you counted anything unsolicited as spam?

If you called anything unsolicited as spam then you would be calling all those flyers you get in your newspaper spam.

In fact anything you got in your mailbox that you didn’t ask for would be spam.  Including all those “guaranteed approval” credit card applications.  I didn’t ask for a new credit card, so why am I getting this application?

And what about on the TV?  Imagine if TV commercials (which I didn’t agree to – I don’t remember allowing my cable company to broadcast TV commercials into my home) were also considered spam?  Then the biggest TV spammer in the world would be who?  Over 6 billion served?  Served what?  Hamburgers, or commercials?

And what of those advertisers who spend millions on a 30 second Superbowl ad – are they spammers too?  Sure it’s easy to limit the definition of spam to unsolicited email.  Everything else which is non-email is advertising right?

Now I’m not saying I agree with spam.  Far from it.  In fact I loathe spam email.  Usually when I go into work in the morning, at least ½ of all the email in my inbox is spam.  And it’s worse after a weekend.  I’ve gone into work with 200 or 300 emails in my inbox, and only 50-80 are ones I wanted to receive.  I couldn’t begin to estimate how much time over the past few years I’ve wasted cleaning out my inbox.  Even with a great spam filter running there’s still a few that manage to get through.

But like I said, I didn’t ask for the flyers in the newspaper, or the credit card applications in my mailbox or even the advertising on TV either.  Shouldn’t this be considered spam?

Now before you go saying things like “but the TV advertising pays for your cheap cable” or something like that, don’t worry.  I’m just trying to make a point here – and that is that the term “spam” (as far as I’m concerned) shouldn’t be limited to just email.

And that leads to my second question – and the one I’m sure will irk more people than the comparisons I’ve already made above.  And that is:

Who is responsible – the spammer who sent the email or the person who received it?

Of course the first response usually is that the sender is responsible, after all the person who received the email had nothing to do with it right?

Well, that would be your first mistake because chances are the person who received the email used their email address somewhere, on some website to download some neat screensaver, or desktop wallpaper or something “free” like that (notice I used the quotes around the word free?  That’s because there is very little on the web that is truly free).

You see, when you give out your email to some website, you may as well give them your home address and phone number.  Because while there are many legitimate websites out there that will not use your email for anything other than sending you email approved by you, there are many other sites that will sell that address.

I’ll explain how I deal with that in a minute.

So before you go out using your email address to get the newest happy face screensaver, or download that wallpaper from this summer’s blockbuster movie, consider where your email could end up.  Like I said, you may as well post your phone number in a public washroom with a “for a good time call...” message, cause that could be about the same thing.

So to answer my question on who’s responsible, let’s take a look at the chain of events which may have led to this person receiving this email that they didn’t want to receive.  For the record, you should know that it was a pornographic email that the person received.

Again, I am not condoning anything here, but I just wanted to get you thinking a bit, before you go condeming someone.

So this person likely used their email address to get that aforementioned free screensaver or desktop wallpaper, or any other of the thousands of free offers out there on the web. 

The website to which they gave their email address, then likely added it to a list and then sold the list.

Now here is where the picture can get a little muddy.

If you go to a search engine like Google and do a search for “opt in email list” you get over 4.6 million results.  That means there are around 4 ½ million company’s claiming to sell lists of emails belonging to people who are supposed to have agreed to receive email.

That means that if I own a company that I want to promote via an email campaign I could purchase a list of supposedly valid email addresses – in most cases millions of “guaranteed” addresses of people who apparently do want to hear about my business offerings.

For a few hundred dollars anyone could purchase said list.

So let’s say the spammer in question thought he was buying such a list.  That is, a list of people who agreed to receive pornographic emails. Now before you question this, consider that porn is still the number one commodity on the web.  This is still the most searched for term on the web.  Why wouldn’t people want to receive emails talking about porn – it’s much easier than searching isn’t it?

So the spammer purchased this list, assuming that it was a list of people who agreed to receive porn emails.  I don’t actually know if this is the fact, but I’m just speculating.  The vendor will say anything to the spammer to get him to buy the list, including saying that the list is of people willing to receive said emails.

So for under $500, the spammer bought the list, and turns around and pumps out 1 million or 2 million emails over the course of a few days.  And for each email he sends he gets paid.  Not much, maybe a penny or 2 per email.  Even as high as 5 or 10 cents per email sent.  Regardless of whether this was an opt in list or not, that’s a pretty good pay check for a $500 investment, don’t you think?

Again, I’m not condoning it, but I am suggesting that there could be other factors at play here.  I’m not saying this is what happened, I’m merely saying this is what could have happened.

So, how does one protect themselves from unsolicited spam emails?

Let me tell you what I do.

I have 7 different email addresses.  That’s right – 7.  And of that 7 there are 3 that are what I consider clean.  That is there are 3 addresses that I use with only trusted sources, such as friends, family and co-workers.  The other 4 are my junk accounts.

These are the ones that I use when there is a bit of software I want to try out but I have to give up my email address to download the demo.  These are also the email addresses I use when I sign up for forum sites, such as software support and the like.  Because you never know who will sell your email address.

Or even if the software support forums don’t sell your address, there have been many cases where these sites have been hacked, and the addresses stolen. Guess where it goes from there?

I have one address which is “the” primary spam address – this is the one I use most of the time when subscribing to those sites that I don’t always trust.  And if I can’t use that address, then I fall back on one of the other three.

And, just so you know, the addresses which I use for the not-so-trustworthy sites are free accounts I set up through major sites like Yahoo, AOL, and MSN.  I would highly recommend you do the same thing - Set up a few accounts which you can “throw away” if you need to.

You should never ever use your home or work email address to subscribe online unless you absolutely have to.  In that case, set yourself up a junk account with your ISP and check it occasionally.  With my home ISP I can set up an additional 5 email addresses.

And of course, have a good, up-to-date virus scanner and spam filter.  Microsoft now offers both a virus scanner and spam filter for free and I think they both work pretty good.  In fact, some people recommend running multiple copies of this software to be truly safe, however you will likely find that some anti-virus programs will not work with another anti-virus running.

So before you go blaming the spammer who sent you the email, consider how he got your email in the first place.  And also consider that, while however unlikely, there is a chance that the spammer thought he was getting a legitimate list of email addresses from users who wanted to receive the email.

Finally, one more piece of advice to give you.

There is a scam called phishing where spammers will attempt to guess email addresses and send out spam to someone hoping they receive it.  And usually at the top or bottom of this email you’ll find a link where it says “if you don’t want to continue receiving these types of emails, click here to continue” and you are taken to a website to unsubscribe.  All you have to do is supply them with the email address which they are supposed to remove.

While this sounds all nice and good, consider what you’ve just done.  You have clicked on a phishing email and went to their website and given them a valid email address.  Do you think your email has been taken off their list?  Think again.  By the time you close that browser window, your email has likely already been shared with dozens or hundreds of other websites.

So what I want to tell you is to just ignore those emails.  Don’t read them, don’t click the links.  Just delete them.  And if you use an email service like MSN’s Hotmail, be sure to mark the email as spam so that Microsoft is notified and will take the proper action against the sender.