Spam Per Se

As the Internet has grown more and more popular and been trying to maintain its freedom of word and even without charge, spam has become more and more of a problem. At first, spam was sent by individual people who gathered a list of addresses, wrote an e-mail describing their product and sent it to the list. Most annoying thing in spam at this time was that these messages usually contained several pages full of addresses and only a few lines of actual message text.

Nowadays, spam is provided by spam professionals as a service. Automated systems gather messages from web pages and usenet news groups and send automated messages to these addresses. Legitimate businesses have attempted opt-out-ideology, where advertisement messages contain instructions on how to resign from the list that has sent the message. Unfortunately the spammers claim to be applying this system in their lists, but actually just use this procedure to confirm validity of addresses. If a person tries to resign from a list, (s)he has read the message.

With the way things are going, spam is becoming a purpose themselves. There are nowadays messages with only the ascii-garble ("akflhsruasernfcaövwryenaewnrashutsre") that is intended to fool spam filtering systems. Even messages with no content at all are sent to addresses on huge lists. Perhaps this is just a glitch in the spam automata; that it found an empty file instead of actual spam content. Or perhaps it's just SpamPerSe.