Spam by any other name…

Twam fell from high of 11% in August 2009 to new low of less than 1% in February 2010.

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”, wrote the bard. Spam, on the other hand, by any other name still smells as foul.

As people look beyond email for communicating with other people, spammers, too, have expanded their repertoire. In the process, they’ve expanded the list of expletives for their excretory practices.

Spam has always had a negative connotation in cyberspace, but its current connection to email appeared only in the 1990s. Before that, it was used to describe certain obnoxious behavior on local bulletin board systems and later, to the excessive posting of multiple messages on Usenet.

When spammers branched out beyond email, the term spam branched out with them. That dilution of the term, though, proved unsatisfactory to some users, and they began to coin their own terms for specific kinds of spam, with amusing results.

Once the Blogosphere got cooking, for example, spammers began targeting the comment sections of blogs with their ejunk.  That kind of spam, which became known as “blam,” would post bogus comments to a blog, as well as Wikis and Web site guest books,  and was designed to drive traffic to the spammer’s Web site. To counter blam, CAPTCHA was introduced to the Web.

CAPTCHA, or Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, requires a would-be commenter to type into a form some distressed letters that are flashed on the screen. What’s displayed is an image of the letters, not actual type. Because the letters aren’t type, they can’t be read by spambots. And because they’re distressed, it’s difficult for them to be scanned and translated into type by OCR software.

Instant Messaging is another target of spammers. IM spam, or spim, isn’t as widespread as email spam, so most of the time it remains under the media’s radar. However, Microsoft recently settled a spim lawsuit against a Hong Kong-based company called Funmobile. As part of the settlement, Microsoft obtained an injunction against Funmobile to bar it from spimming the users of Softzilla’s Live Messenger service. It also received a cash payment, the amount of which was not disclosed to the public. According to the lawsuit, Funmobile used spimming to obtain the personal information of Live Messenger users, information that was used by third parties to send mass spam and phishing messages to the users’ contacts.

The Internet telephone service Skype has grown in popularity over the years and as is sadly too true on the Net, popularity is a magnet for spammers, or in Skype’s case, skammers. Skam, as Skype spam has been called, has been around since the middle of the decade and despite claims from time to time by Skype’s operators that they’ve licked the problem, it keeps popping up like a noggin on a decapitated hydra. Last month, the service made yet more changes it hopes will give it the upper hand in its battle against skam. It includes making it easier for users to report skammers after blocking them.

“These reports are very useful to us,” wrote Peter Parkes in the company’s blog. “They help us to detect patterns in spam activity, as well as allowing us to disable the accounts of individual spammers. So you’re not just reporting a single spammer–you’re helping us to reduce the total amount of spam on Skype.”

I’ve had a cellphone for years, but it was only last week that I received my first smam. Smam is spam delivered by text, or SMS, message. You’d think that spammers would have jumped on the smam bandwagon by now, but apparently the barriers to entering the field aren’t to their liking. As Amir Lev ex plained in a recent PC World column, it costs money to send SMS messages while the alternative, email, costs nothing. “[I]n the SMS world, the privilege of sending bulk SMS is reserved for those with money and a valid contract,” he writes. “Bulk SMS might cost a few cents per message to send: a couple of orders of magnitude more than email.”

At one time, twams were a lot more troublesome than they are today. Twams are spam messages sent on Twitter. Actually, Twitter has a broader definition of spam than that. It includes Posting harmful links to phishing or malware sites, repeatedly posting duplicate tweets, and aggressively following and un-following accounts to attract attention. According to the company, though, its campaign to squash twam is bearing fruit. From a high point in August of last year when 11 percent of all daily tweets were twam, it’s plummeted to less than one percent a day in February of this year.

Facebook has been known to be hit by spam but so far, no cute terms have been attached to the practice. How does fabam sound?