Dr. Baczewski was unable to complete the column he had planned for this month so we will revisit a topic of interest to anyone who has been an active Internet user. 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. 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. However, some private online service, such America Online, have instituted policies to prevent spammers from spamming their subscribers. Spam has become so ubiquitous that it has reportedly been added to the latest edition of the New Oxford Dictionary of English .