The Internet is a global community where people seek information, communicate, and conduct business. Billions upon billions of bits of information flow via the Internet every day. As users of the Internet, we all have at one time or another received unsolicited communication from commercial sources. Most times this electronic communication or Spam comes to us without our permission or our ability to choose whether we prefered to receive it or not. How do most of us feel about this? Do we feel the same about normal commercial advertising delivered by the U.S. Post Office? Do we just throw this mail away without thinking about it?

The vast majority of people either scan normal commercial advertisement (or not), then commit them to the trash without much feeling or thought either way. Why are we so indifferent to Internet advertising? Is it the thought of receiving solicitation at our computers, or could it be the content of Spam? The content of normal commercial advertisement sent via the U.S. Postal System is covered under strict federal guidelines. It is a federal offence to use the U.S. Postal System to send or receive illegal materials, or to utilize the system for the purposes of committing a crime. These same laws do not pertain to the Internet. The Internet is unregulated. Spam does not adhere to guidelines governing regulated postal mail.

The fact is, more often than not Spam attempts to solicit Internet users with advertising for dubious or questionable products -- up to and include pornography. Furthermore, Spam is directed at the masses, which includes those who would not have otherwise choosen to receive it.

On a practical level, spam is currently flooding the Internet with extremely large volumes of unwanted, unsolicited mail. In the past, one well known ISP stated that they were receiving 1.8 million spams from Cyber Promotions per day until they received a court injunction to stop it. Let's do the math. Assuming that it takes the typical user 5 seconds to identify and discard a spam message, that is 2,500 hours per day of connect time spent discarding spam alone. By contrast, with one access line that costs then spammer less than $100 per day, no other type of advertising costs the advertiser so little and the recipient so much.

Theft of resources. To avoid blocks that many systems have placed against the mail coming directly from the spammer's systems, an increasing number of spammers send most, if not all their mail, via intermediate systems. Due to a historical quirk, most mailing systems on the Internet will deliver mail to anyone, not just their own users. This fills the intermediate system's network with unwanted mail taking up valuable time dealing with all the undeliverable messages. This also subjects the ISP to complaints from recipients who conclude that since the intermediate system delivered the mail, they must be conspiring with the spammer.

Many other spammers use hit and run techniques. A spammer could purchase a trial dial-up account at an ISP, send tens of thousands of messages, then abandon the account unless the provider notices what they're doing and cancels it first. This leaves the provider to clean up the mess. Many spammers have done this tens or dozens of times forcing the providers to waste valuble resources on cleanup and monitoring accounts for such abuse.