The San Francisco-based message filtering company says their online Logistics and Operations Center intercepted somewhere between 8,000 and 13,000 spam attacks each day last week. Spam is electronic junk mail or junk newsgroup postings. Some people define spam even more generally as any unsolicited e-mail.
Real spam is generally e-mail advertising for some product sent to a mailing list or newsgroup.
In addition to wasting people's time with unwanted e-mail, spam also eats up a lot of network bandwidth. Consequently, there are many organizations, as well as individuals, who have taken it upon themselves to fight spam with a variety of techniques. Some private online services, such as America Online, have strict policies to prevent spammers from spamming their subscribers. Brightmail says the reason for the recent jump in spam can be attributed to the political and holiday season. But because the Internet is public, there is really little that can be done to prevent spam, just as it is impossible to prevent junk mail.