Lecture Twelve: Reading (URL) - The Problem with SPAM

There are the personal problems of checking your email. The more spam you recieve the harder it gets to find the valid email amongst the rubbish. In addition to this the faster you try to delete the spam the greater the risk of deleting a real email by mistake.
On another level spam stresses the infrastructure of the internet. It requires large amounts of disk space to store all the spam until it is collected and requires large amounts of data to be transmitted along the internet's many connections. Guess who ends up paying for all of this.
Spam has become a problem because of the economics. A spammer can send out millions of emails for a tiny amount of money. The number of people who respond is tiny but even a tiny fraction responding can be enough to make it profitable. It is difficult, if not impossible, to exert any sort of commercial pressure on spammers currently because the internet and email grew up in a trusted academic world. Let loose in the real world there are too many ways for a spammer to hide who they really are. There are several proposals to change this but none of them are here now.
In addition as more and more people get clued up as to how to avoid spam the spammers respond by pumping out more and more emails to try and catch those few people who don't know how to avoid spam.