Information technology in the era of digital today continues to grow rapidly and become important for the society. It used also extends to all aspects of life, which is invention of email. The invention of email is a serious contribution to human civilization in communication. But as the technology develops, the invention of email has been damaged by an act called email spamming.
Spam Mail defined as email that contain things that we do not want and sometimes send from people we do not know at all. Spam or junk mail is a problem for current internet mail's users. Therefore, do you believe that junk mail can earn money? As what has reported on the MoneyPantry, there are 4 companies that will pay you such as Small Business Knowledge Center, USmonitor, The Hause Group, and Quotas.
Nevertheless, spam has no benefit at all. As what Cindy M. Rise mentioned in her book A Justification for the Prohibition of Spam in 2002 if there are three disadvantages caused by spam, such as cost shifting, waste of resources, and content.
The first reason why spam is harmful is cost shifting. Cost shifting is the cost that the recipient get is greater than it should be. It can be said that, spam incur a cost that must be borne by the recipient while the spammer only pays a small portion of the shipping costs.
That way, the recipient will pay every second or byte that uses to open, read, and delete the e-mail that he/she does not want. It is estimated that the costs needed to read and delete spam take up to $2 per month. The costs incurred do seem a little problem. However, if there are hundreds of e-mails every month, it will cost a lot of money and cause other problems. (Rice, Cindy M: p.397)
Actually who bears the biggest cost of spam is an Internet Service Provider(ISPs); internet access providers such as PT. Telkomsel Indonesia. From the number of spam activities, ISPs must incur quite large costs. As a result, the computer performance system slows down, swells data storage space, and must increase the bandwidth. Aside from that, ISPs must provide filtering facilities which costs a lot of money and effort so that users are not disappointed. According to David E Sorkin, "Spam represents a significant proportion of all e-mail traffic, consuming massive amounts of network bandwidth, memory, storage space, and other resources" (p.336). Spamhaus also describes evidence in 21st of October 2018 that ISPs categorize several links that can be called spam such as htu.cc (236 cases), shtel.net.cn (140 cases), zzidc.com (109 cases). Therefore, Cindy M. Rise emphasized that spam is waste of resources.
Then the last is content, because most of the problems are in the contents which brought by email spam. If described by a pyramid, the contents of spam can be categorized from offers about sexual material to important offers about computer network security systems. Because of the many insignificant offers, users become less interested and even intolerant of spam.
They immediately delete all spam e-mails that come to their mail storage. The problem is that many important e-mails are deleted accidentally. In addition, according to US-Cert, "Most users get viruses from opening and running unknown email attachments" (par.9). As a result, public trust in e-mail as one of the telecommunication facilities has diminished. (Rice, Cindy M: 383)
Spamming is an act that can cause a lot of harm to other parties. Many people are annoyed by e-mail spam, for example the news published by MoneyPantry. According to user reports that 2 of the 4 companies committed fraud. But so far, the report cannot be said to be a hoax because there is no definite research about making money via spam e-mail. To prevent other losses, some countries have implemented detailed and definite spamming regulations such as the United States with CAN-SPAM ACT 2003 and Australia through the Spam Act 2003. Thus, e-mail will be considered good again if the user does not abuse it.
References:
"These 4 Companies Will Pay You to Receive Junk Mail!". MoneyPantry, 2016. 3rd of October 2018.