Windows 8 In Depth

Fighting Spam

Email users of the world are no doubt nostalgic for a time when Spam was just a tasty pork product. Now it is the scourge of email systems throughout the world, as unsolicited email messages from an ever-increasing number of junk-mail senders congest mail systems and take up space on our computers. Spam is such a problem because, on the scale of subversive electronic activities, it is fairly easy to do, fairly difficult to be caught, and very inexpensive for the sender. Despite ridiculously low response rates, spammers continue to dupe shady advertisers into paying for it.

Although the most important cost involved with spam is in human time—time spent reading, deleting, and devising ways to fight it—there’s actually a huge environmental ...