Spamming

Situation #1

You want to promote a book you wrote on the Internet. Since you want to reach as broad an audience as possible, you post your advertisement on the USENET newsgroups. You don't take time to figure out which are the most appropriate newsgroups for such a posting and cross-post to dozens of them.

Commentary

Closely related to the topic of chain email is spamming. In many ways spamming is even worse than chain email because, instead of affecting only the specific email recipients and the systems they use, it affects every system which carries the newsgroups to which the message is posted. While sending a chain email to a mailing list may effect hundreds of people on hundreds of systems around the world, spamming a common newsgroup such as alt.sex will affect thousands of systems around the world. For this waste of disk space, time, and bandwidth, as with chain email, ITD, as well as most Internet service providers, have policies against spamming. If you spam, you risk losing your use of ITD computing resources. If the spam involves sending money through the U.S. Postal Service, you are also breaking federal law.

Relevant Policies and Reference Documents

Author: Jeff Traigle
Last Updated: Wednesday, 21-Aug-96 18:27:58 EDT