Unsolicited Bulk (Spam) Email Message

A Unsolicited Bulk (Spam) Email Message is an unsolicited email message that is a bulk email message.

• AKA: Junk Email.
• Context:
  • It can (typically) be sent by Spam Emailers.
  • It can be detected by a Spam Email Detection System (that solves a spam email detection task).
  • It can be filtered by a Spam Email Filtering System (that solves a spam email filtering task).
  • It can range from being an Non-Inappropriate Unsolicited Bulk (Spam) Email Message to being an Inappropriate Unsolicited Bulk (Spam) Email Message.
  • …
• Example(s):
  • a Sales Email Message from a company that purchased an email address list.
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • Junk Mail.
  • Socially Engineered Email Attack.
  • Junk SMS.
  • …
• See: Inappropriate Content, Spam Filtering, Electronic Spam, Email Attachment, HTML Email, Security Vulnerability, Phishing, Malware.

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References

2020

• (Wikipedia, 2020) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_spam Retrieved:2020-1-21.
  • Email spam, also referred to as junk email, is unsolicited messages sent in bulk by email (spamming).

    The name comes from Spam luncheon meat by way of a Monty Python sketch in which Spam is ubiquitous, unavoidable, and repetitive. Email spam has steadily grown since the early 1990s, and by 2014 was estimated that it made up around 90% of email messages sent. Since the expense of the spam is borne mostly by the recipient, it is effectively postage due advertising. This makes it an excellent example of a negative externality.

    The legal definition and status of spam varies from one jurisdiction to another, but laws and lawsuits have nowhere been particularly successful in stemming spam.

    Most email spam messages are commercial in nature. Whether commercial or not, many are not only annoying, but also dangerous because they may contain links that lead to phishing web sites or sites that are hosting malware - or include malware as file attachments.

    Spammers collect email addresses from chat rooms, websites, customer lists, newsgroups, and viruses that harvest users' address books. These collected email addresses are sometimes also sold to other spammers.

2018

• https://www.spamhaus.org/consumer/definition/
  • QUOTE: Unsolicited means that the Recipient has not granted verifiable permission for the message to be sent. Bulk means that the message is sent as part of a larger collection of messages, all having substantively identical content.

    A message is Spam only if it is both Unsolicited and Bulk.

    • Unsolicited Email is normal email
      (examples: first contact enquiries, job enquiries, sales enquiries)
    • Bulk Email is normal email
      (examples: subscriber newsletters, customer communications, discussion lists)

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