Unsolicited e-mail, commonly know as “spam” is one of the more heated issues on the Internet. It is considered a breach of “Netiquette” and often generates many more complaints than sales. This is due to the tremendous number of unsolicited e-mails received everyday by some individuals and because of the damage and expense spamming causes.
Spammers who can send up to several million e-mails per day can cause hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in bandwidth charges a day to Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) like CIIC. This activity can cause incredible damage to an ISP’s network resources not to mention the cost involved in trying to stop this activity. Most experts agree that almost 20% of all e-mail is spam. Spam ties up network resources, slows down mail and web servers, and is a leading source of fraud on the Internet.
Many other problems are generated when the spammers try to avoid the hassles of bounced e-mail and complaints by spoofing and forging header information. The bounced e-mail is often sent to an unsuspecting, innocent user, who often has to bear the brunt of angry victims. In a further attempt to hide their identity, some “spammers” hijack third party servers, sometimes causing server crashes and system damage, as well as the additional data transfer cost.
This sort of unsolicited advertising is also against the policies of upstream providers. By allowing our customers to violate our policy, we would be violating our contract with our providers and risking disruption of service.
CIIC reserves the right at all times to determine what is considered to be unacceptable bulk-email or spam.
This barely begins to scratch the surface of the “spam” issue. Further information can be found at the sites listed below: