What is spam?
E-mail spam is defined as "unsolicited commercial e-mail", also known as "bulk e-mail" or "junk e-mail". It is characterized by nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients by e- mail. E-mail spam has existed since the beginning of the Internet, even before web sites "as we know them" came into being, and has grown to about 90 billion messages a day.

Who is generating all this spam mail?
Fewer than 200 spammers send about 80% of the spam. The people mostly responsible are criminals in the US, Russia, China, South Korea, Nigeria, and Eastern Europe.

Why do they send spam?
Spam is primarily a medium for criminals to defraud users. Many different scams are tried. You may wonder how anyone could make money with spam since these scams are public knowledge and people have learned to avoid them. However, spam fraud is a numbers game, and if hundreds of thousands of attempts can be made for very little cost and effort, even if only a small percentage of the scams actually work, that translates into significant money. Spam can also be used in "denial of service" attacks on a particular company's email servers. Such attacks send so much email to the server that it is overwhelmed and cannot service its intended clients. This could be simple maliciousness, or someone with a vested interest in the failure of a company could hire a hacker for this purpose.