What is Spam?

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Spam in a general sense is any email you don't want to receive. There are many types of email that you may not want e.g. advertisements, newsletters, or questionnaires, however these emails are not what the computer community refers to as spam. What the computer community is most concerned with is illegal email spam.
My definition of illegal email spam is -- attempts to deceive by falsification of seller identity or email address, and use of other trickery (defrauding), in the hope of gaining monetary advantage (stealing) from the email recipient and other parties. 
 
The Federal Trade Commission's definition of spam, "Not all UCE is fraudulent, but fraud operators - often among the first to exploit any technological innovation - have seized on the Internet's capacity to reach literally millions of consumers quickly and at a low cost through UCE. In fact, UCE has become the fraud artist's calling card on the Internet. Much of the spam in the Commission's database contains false information about the sender, misleading subject lines, and extravagant earnings or performance claims about goods and services. These types of claims are the stock in trade of fraudulent schemes."