Spam
Mass unwanted email
Spam is the more widely used term for Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE), also known as Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE). Spam emails are unsolicited - the recipient does not want to receive them and has not given permission for the message to be sent to them - and are sent in bulk, to many addresses.
Spam takes a variety of forms, from simple promotional messages sent out to advertise a company's offerings, to 'pump-and-dump' campaigns trying to inflate the price of stocks and shares. Phishing scams also involve spam - emails are made to look as if they come from a bank or shop and try to trick recipients out of valuable access codes and personal details.
Malware is also often seeded via spam campaigns, either attached to mails (often the case with mass-mailer worms) or linked to from within messages.
Spam makes up a large proportion of all mail (some estimates for busy months are as high as 95% of all messages) and an unfiltered mailbox can be very difficult to manage, wasting huge amounts of user time finding their genuine emails.
