Junk mail and spam

[oogie]

1. Please tell me the difference between junk mail and spam?
2. I normally get about 20 to 30 messages a day from my friends. Suddenly,
I'm getting only junk mail and spam. I havn't received a message from anyone
of my friends in about a week. This is very unusual. Can you tell me
why?--
oogie

 

[R. C. White]

Hi, oogie.

1. Please tell me the difference between junk mail and spam?

SPAM is one form of junk mail; there are several others.

SPAM is the name given several years ago to unsolicited commercial
messages - about the same thing as the ads that arrive from the post office
in our mailbox several times a week. But with a computer and email, the
volume of such mailings increased dramatically. "Snail mail" costs a lot
more, for printing and postage of all that paper, to send a million pieces
than to send ten. But the cost-per-piece of electronic mail is practically
zero, so the sender can mail a million pieces as cheaply as ten.

Other forms of junk mail depend on who is getting it. I may think that
email from Oprah is junk; you may be happy to get it. "Junk" can include
mailing lists that we forgot to unsubscribe, or offers from Nigeria to share
the $200 million (or insert your own giant number here) that the sender
can't get out of the country without using your bank account for just a few
days - or even email responses to newsgroup threads. One form of junk that
makes me maddest is email from friends who are eager to "send this to
everybody you know!" - especially from friends who have been online for a
while and ought to know better. And most especially if the forwarded bundle
includes the names and email addresses of 50 friends - and 50 of THEIR
friends - and so on! No wonder SPAMMERS are able to harvest so many of our
addresses. :>(

2. I normally get about 20 to 30 messages a day from my friends.
Suddenly,
I'm getting only junk mail and spam. I havn't received a message from
anyone
of my friends in about a week. This is very unusual. Can you tell me
why?--
oogie

I can't even guess at this one because you've given us nothing to go on. We
don't even know if you are using POP3 or Hotmail or Yahoo or...???

And you are using the browser interface to ask about a mail program. When
asking about Windows Mail, why not USE Windows Mail to ask?

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP
Windows Live Mail 2009 (14.0.8089.0726) in Win7 Ultimate x64

 

[Charlie Tame]

You got that dead right R.C.

Oogie it is hard to explain the "Friends" thing, do you have security
software installed like Antivirus etc, if so what?

 

[Sam Hobbs]

Many people might give the impression of having an authoritative answer to
that question, but the truth is that the terms are not official terms and
are defined differently by many people. Do you know where the term "spam"
came from? It originally had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with
computers or even anything electronic. If you really want an answer, you
need to search yourself. One quick and easy way to get answers is the
Wikipedia; the following are probably the most relevant Wikipedia articles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_spam
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(electronic)

Note that the first thing that the E-mail spam article says is "E-mail spam,
also known as junk e-mail". Many people won't even try to differentiate the
two terms. The two official terms that the US government uses are
unsolicited bulk email (UBE) and unsolicited commercial email (UCE). The
following has many relevant links.

http://www.sendmail.org/~ca/email/spam.html