How Does Spam Affect ISPs?
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Defining Internet Spam
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Internet spam is one of the largest issues affecting quality of service from Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Although widely acknowledged as an international issue, the definition of what constitutes spam varies widely across U.S. states and other countries. The simplest definition is solely commercial email which is not solicited by the user. Another is the receipt of bulk email that has not been requested by the user. Typically, every time a local or federal government strictly defines spam, the companies and users which generate the unwanted email work around the explicit definition of what is not allowed. A more modern definition has begun to emerge in the market place in order to allow desired email through to the end-user and prevent unwanted deliveries--that spam is simply email that the user does not desire. Still not a perfect solution since this option prevents legitimate business marketing email from being delivered, the spam definition will continue to evolve as ISPs and consumers continue to work around the problems that spam creates.
How Spam Affects ISPs
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The single largest effect spam has on ISPs is that it wastes ISP bandwidth and storage resources. Additionally, it increases costs for customer support to aid the end-users who are trying to combat spam. Spam also creates issues with significantly increasing ISP server strain due to the large volume of email traffic that has to be processed in a short amount of time. If the traffic level is high enough, it can significantly reduce the responsiveness for legitimate customers as well as crash the server if too high. Another issue that spam creates for ISPs is that when the ISPs server tries to reply to a spam email that is sent to a non-existent email address it takes up more of the server's resources further bogging down the server. Additionally, spam can create a higher customer service cost for an ISP to deal with complaints. Many ISPs have shifted to email or Internet filing of complaints to save resources in this area, but are still negatively affected by the unsolicited spam.
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ISP Solutions for Controlling Spam
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ISPs employ a number of blocking techniques in order to contain the current spam problem and provide an adequate quality of service to the customer. A popular ISP feature which has emerged in order to engage the consumer to help combat the spam issue is to provide a means to report spam to the ISP. Although this tactic does not solve the throughput and rejected email issues at the ISP-level, it does help the ISP blacklist or ban known email providers that produce unwanted email. This tool can further be tailored to prevent one user from in-inadvertently blocking email that other users might desire by blacklisting at the individual account level and moving to the ISP level on multiple reports. Typically ISPs provide this option as a button to select when using WebMail or other Internet-based reporting means. Another tool that ISPs have used is implementing published blacklists to filter spam email at the ISP level to block spam prior to receipt by the email server. Although none of these methods is a perfect solution at the ISP level, through proper use they are proven at keeping the spam issue contained to an acceptable level.
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