Discuss spamming with relevant examples.

What will be an ideal response?

Answers will vary. Spam refers to unsolicited email sent to a large group of individuals at one time. The electronic equivalent of junk mail, spam is most often used to sell products or services to individuals and can be sent via email, text, instant, or social media messages. Spam is also used in phishing schemes and other dot cons and is sent frequently via botnets. A great deal of spam involves health-related products, counterfeit products, pornography, and fraudulent business opportunities and stock deals. Spam can also be generated by individuals forwarding email messages they receive to everyone in their address books. In addition to spam, most individuals receive marketing emails either from companies they directly provided with their email addresses or from other companies that acquired their email addresses from a third party, such as from a partner site or via a purchased mailing list. While these latter types of marketing email messages do not technically fit the definition of spam because they were permission-based, many individuals consider them to be spam.?While email spam is decreasing as a result of better spam filters and other protections, it is still a problem. In fact, Kaspersky Labs recently estimated that about 66% of all email messages are spam. At best, spam is an annoyance to recipients and can slow a mail server's delivery of important messages. At worst, spam can disable a mail network completely, or it can cause recipients to miss or lose important email messages because those messages have been caught in a spam filter or were accidentally deleted by the recipient while he or she was deleting a large number of spam email messages. Most Internet users spend several minutes each day dealing with spam, making spam expensive for businesses in terms of lost productivity, consumption of communications bandwidth, and drain of technical support. Spam sent to a smartphone, either via text message or email, is also expensive for end users who have a limited data or text message allowance.?One of the most common ways of getting on a spam mailing list is by having your email address entered into a marketing database, which can happen when you sign up for a free online service or use your email address to register a product or make an online purchase. Spammers also use software to gather email addresses from Web pages, forum posts, and social media. Please see the section "Understanding Privacy Concerns" for more information.