Programming Internet Email

The UCE Problem

Spam has been around as long as the Internet. Indeed, if one looks at the vast quantities of unsolicited snail (postal) mail, fax spam, and telemarketing (phone spam) that one is exposed to, one begins to appreciate that USE is not an Internet phenomenon; it is a social one.

Spam is a particular problem on the Internet because:

• We all share (very) limited bandwidth.

• Some of us pay for our connections on a time or amount of data received basis.

• Many MUAs force you to download or even display a message before it may be deleted.

• With the appropriately evil software, it is as easy to send a message to 50 million people as to one; your upstream MTA does all of the work.

Unlike traditional postal spam, Internet users often pay to receive the unwanted material. This is also true for fax spam, but fax spam cannot be generated in the quantity that email spam can be since only one number can be dialed at a time. Thus, email spam on the Internet is to be expected since we see the same behavior elsewhere in society,^[27] but it is a particular problem because elsewhere it does not cause the recipient to undergo such great expense for something that they have not requested and do not want.

Several countries and some states have specific laws against fax spam and are now experimenting with laws to combat email spam in a similar manner. These efforts will need to wait for case law and legal precedent to determine their usefulness.

Spam on the Internet is hard to control because the Internet ...