Spam

Spam is a form of Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE), namely widely distributed electronic mail or posting to a variety or newsgroups (blending into excessive cross-posting, which can also be noncommercial).

This has been a hot topic on the internet, in part because of the ease with which one's private email address can be picked up by automated programs ('bots) and added to widely distributed mailing lists.

Furthermore, a disproportionate amount of what is being offered by spam is fraudulent, valueless, or illegal.

There are a lot of sites on the Web devoted to this problem. One such is http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~ivl/nags