Spam can't be considered a form of "free speech." Even if you're guaranteed the right to say what you want, you're not guaranteed a platform from which to say it. As often as you want. Essentially for free. And maybe even to earn money for saying it.

Characteristics of e-mail spam
(or, unwanted, unsolicited e-mail usually of a commercial nature and sometimes even offensive)

• Negligible costs to advertisers.
• Advertisers offer low-quality merchandise or services (or maybe they could afford to use other media).
• Recipients (usually) don't ask for it.
• Recipients are required to take action to get off an e-mail advertising list. And advertisers seldom heed those requests anyway.
• Advertisers generally use fake e-mail addresses so you can't respond to them directly.
• Advertisers sometimes sell your e-mail address to other spammers, compounding the problem.
• Advertisers sometimes use unsuspecting third-party providers or trial dial-up accounts to route spam.
• Some spam is simply illegal.

Usenet spam defined

The term "spam"... means "the same article (or essentially the same article) posted an unacceptably high number of times to one or more newsgroups." CONTENT IS IRRELEVANT. "Spam" doesn't mean "ads." It doesn't mean "abuse." It doesn't mean "posts whose content I object to." Spam is a funky name for a phenomenon that can be measured pretty objectively: did that post appear X times?
-- Falk, Net Abuse FAQ, http://www.cybernothing.org/faqs/net-abuse-faq.html

Examples of spam: B1FF

B1FF was intended to show the Usenet community how NOT to communicate with the world:

• Fictitious poster, created as a joke circa 1988
• Parodies usage of teenagers, "newbies," and others not familiar with netiquette
• Typical language includes all caps, intentional misspellings and number substitutions, exclamation points, quick flames and long signature files
• Quote:

C0WABUNGA D00DZ!
YOU SUCK SO THERE!

Examples of spam: Canter & Siegel

Lawrence Canter and Martha Siegel are referred to as the "Green Card Lawyers."

• In 1994, sent repeated messages to tens of thousands of Usenet groups offering to help internationals enter the US green card lottery for $100 per person (something the US government enables for free)
• Denied Internet access by numerous providers
• Wrote How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway as a result of their experiences (Leavitt, The Canter & Siegel File) -- though I own this book as a reference, I won't give you an amazon.com link for it, because I don't believe in what it preaches.

Examples of spam: MAKE.MONEY.FAST

This famous (and illegal in the US) chain-letter SPAM has appeared on nearly every Usenet group multiple times in the early- to mid-1990s and still shows up today. Readers send $1 or $2 to each of five names on a list; then modify the list to include their names and addresses; then repost the list to five or ten other Usenet groups. For this they are told they will make thousands of dollars!

Never mind that the Laws of Thermodynamics don't include Conservation of Wealth: for someone to make thousands of dollars, thousands of others (read: suckers) must lose a dollar or two each.

Examples of spam: Serdar Argic

Serdar Argic was an activist/spammer, thought by some to be a software robot-poster acting for an organization, rather than a single individual. Argic's mission was to reconstruct history: to deny the genocide of Armenians by Turks during World War I.

His/its strategy was to say the same thing over and over. He/it did it well: at one point in 1994 Argic's reconstruction posts accounted for 0.5% of ALL Usenet activity!

Examples of spam: Valery Fabrikant

Once a professor of Mechanical Engineering at Canada's Concordia University, Fabrikant publicly accused his Dean and other colleagues of scientific misconduct in claiming credit for Fabrikant's work. For this he posted detailed accounts repeatedly to engineering newsgroups. His claims were ultimately found by independent investigators to be true, but in the meantime...

Fabrikant was denied reappointment by the department; his lawsuits were thrown out of court. He finally shot and killed the Dean and three others in 1991.

Examples of spam: Archimedes Plutonium

"Atom Totality" is Archimedes Plutonium's theory on the interconnectedness of all things. To Plutonium, the universe is enclosed in a plutonium atom.

"God is 231Pu [the element Plutonium] and the best bible is the best most up-to-date physics textbook."

Archie, as some Usenet readers like to refer to him, posts to engineering and science newsgroups regularly, setting himself up as an expert in nearly all physical sciences and asserting that the Plutonium atom is God. And that's really his name. :-)

Examples of spam: Craig Shergold

In 1989, the following message was spread throughout Great Britain, eventually making it to the USA:

Craig Shergold is seven years old and suffering from terminal cancer. It is his ambition to be included in the Guinness Book of Records for the largest number of business cards ever collected by one person. Craig would be grateful if you could send one of your business cards to the address below and also send the enclosed pages, including one of your own, to another ten companies. Obviously, speed is of the essence....

Since Shergold was born on 06.24.1979, it would appear that his cancer is no longer terminal. But the business cards and get-well cards kept on accumulating. A well-meaning co-worker at the NASA Glenn Research Center, where I used to work, circulated a form letter like the above to thousands of employees at Glenn in 1994. I stopped him before he embarrassed himself further, but he wasn't happy with me for pointing out that he fell for what had become an urban legend.

On 23 March 1991 Craig Shergold faced the media with his mom and millionaire John Kluge, who had paid for the op that cured him. She said, among other things, 'It's a miracle - but please, no more cards.'
-- Goldstuck, Craig Shergold FAQ

Strategies for overcoming e-mail spam

The Usenet community polices itself against spam, to some extent. Not always, however: the loss of the misc.jobs.* family of newsgroups to spamming headhunters must be considered a failure of anti-spam users to reach a consensus on how those groups were to be organized to inhibit spammers. (I was among that group, so the failure is mine as well.)

E-mail spam, on the other hand, affects each user differently. We have to take some combination of these actions, depending on our situations:

• complaining to service providers (when they are known)
• tracing messages to their source (when providers are not known)
• hiding your e-mail address from spammers (e.g. by editing your return address in e-mails and Usenet postings)
• blocking and filtering spammers' addresses (which will unfortunately change frequently)
• using two different e-mail addresses: one for e-mail only; the other with e-mail blocked for Web and Usenet activity (AOL is one provider that enables this)
• provide Web-sniffers with a large number of fake e-mail addresses for every real one they sniff out -- there's a wonderful fake-address generator at hostedscripts.com.

Bad strategies

• fighting spam with more spam
• believing the "click here to remove" link in each message
• answering each message (your answer, if received at all, will probably be ignored)

Boycott Internet spam!