Essay About Constant Onslaught Of Spam Emails And New Communication Technologies

New Communication Technologies – Spam Emails
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New Communication Technologies
Essay
Spam emails
Email has become one of the leading communication technologies of the 21st Century.
This form of communication allows the user to easily communicate from their
computer quickly and efficiently throughout the world with minimal cost. Whilst this
technology has opened up worldwide communications it also has had many negative
attributes with the constant onslaught of Spam emails to users. Under Australian
Legislation a Spam email is defined as an unsolicited commercial electronic message
(Spam Act 2003 – Frequently Asked Questions – www.acma.gov.au). According to
one market research firm, the Radicati Group there are nearly 15 billion spam
messages sent out each day (Fallows, D – Spam – How it is hurting email and
degrading life on the internet – Page 7). In this essay we will look at the history of
Spam emails and how they degrade the use of this new communication technology
through the time consumed with handling these unsolicited messages, the reduction of
bandwidth and the costs involved to ISPs (Internet Service Providers) and the mistrust
they create for users.
Internet based email was invented by computer engineer Ray Tomlinson in late 1971
when using the ARPAnet. ARPA stands for the Advanced Research Projects Agency,
a branch of the military that developed top-secret systems and weapons during the
Cold War. The network was established for the military to protect the flow of
information between military installations and was the precursor to the Internet and
the World Wide Web. ARPAnet created the TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol
of the Internet Protocol Suite) communications standard, which defines data transfer
on the Internet today. The ARPAnet opened in 1969 and was quickly taken over by
civilians mainly university scholars who utilized this technology to share the few
computers that existed at that time.
Merigan – Page 2
The first Spam message was sent on 3 May 1978. It was sent to addresses taken from
a printed directory of ARPAnet users mostly from universities and corporations.
(Bellis, Mary – www.about.com). Even in 1978, recipients were unhappy with this
unsolicited message and many sent complaints to the sender (Templeton. B -The
reaction to the DEC Spam of 1978 – www.templeton.com/spam).
During the next two decades development of the Internet and the World Wide Web by
Dr Tim Berners-Lee and the availability of cheap hardware and software saw a new
revolution in communication. By the 1990s email usage became as popular as the
telephone and in the last decade most people in the western world now have access to
their own email address. Most people would find it hard to imagine life without this
technology.
With the acceptance of email, users are now being bombarded with Spam emails on a
daily basis. Spam exists because large amounts of it can be sent out for a very low
cost and to computers worldwide. Australia and the USA have legislation against the
generation of Spam – though messages are still received to users in these countries
from overseas servers.
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