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Serious About Weight Loss? Or perhaps you’d be more interested in Safe and easy hair removal. Or perhaps you’d like to buy some Xanax. You may think I’ve lost my mind, but these are just a few of the emails I received just this morning in my e-mail inbox. No, I didn’t request information about Weight loss, even though I could use some. And I’m not interested in safe and easy hair removal. And as nervous I am standing up here, I’m still not interested in buying some Xanax. So why did I receive them? One word: Spam. No, I’m not talking about that icky canned food that made itself popular in the 1950s, but rather that email stuff that we find in our mailboxes everyday, sometimes amounting to hundreds of messages in a 24-hour period. According to the Fourth Edition of the The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Spam can be defined as Unsolicited e-mail, often of a commercial nature, sent indiscriminately to multiple mailing lists, individuals, or newsgroups, and its spread at rapid rates. According to Annie Coryat, president of Gracie Media, in a BusinessWeek article, their company sends out over 20 million e-mail ads a day. If that’s just one company, imagine how many are actually sent out in one day by all the companies that send out Spam messages. AOL alone blocks 2.4 Billion messages a day. There are two main ways that spam is spread throughout the internet. The first way is by marketing agencies. Some companies spend a lot of money on advertising each year. Often, companies will pay internet marketing agencies to send out emails for them advertising their products. Another common way that spam emails are spread throughout the internet is by a practice called “Harvesting” emails from sites.
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