the secure:channel

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This week, spam e-mail turns 30 years old. The first record of a spam e-mail message was on May 3, 1978, when a Digital Equipment Corporation marketing person sent a bulk unsolicited text message over the Arpanet network.  The message advertised new native protocol support for the department of defense’s network in some of the company’s products. The protocol for text messages had only been hashed out in RFC 733 five months earlier, and it was already being used for sales pitches.

The word “spam” originates from the 1970 Monty Python’s Flying Circus comedy sketch where a repetitive advertising spiel is used to pitch ”Spam, lovely Spam, wonderful Spam”, the Hormel processed meat product. When a flood of messages was used online in an annoying manner, it was sometimes referred to as “spam”, from the sketch.

Although the word is often used to refer to bulk unsolicited e-mail, it often is used to refer to other repetitive annoying messages on Usenet and other electronic systems, including telephone systems.

The first spam message had been sent out by manually entering every single Arpanet test messaging address that the sender had. The message violated Arpanet usage policies, and resulted in a huge negative reaction by the recipients.

A notorious incident occured in April, 1994, when a law firm used an automated system to post their green card services in every single USENET newsgroup, a forum type system on the Internet. Although this was one of the first incidents to have a major impact on Internet users, at that time the Internet was mostly only used by colleges and the government. Because most computers came with a Microsoft operating system installed, it wasn’t until Windows 95 came out around 1995 with it’s only native support to connect directly to the Internet, when most people got their first taste of USENET and e-mail.

During the 1990s, the use of e-mail for important business communication was just starting to pick up. When spam first started, it was infrequent, and usuallly one could actually reply to the junk e-mail to admonish the author.

Today, e-mail is used more than telephones for communication, and spam is a faceless plague coming from rogue computers, filling our inboxes and wasting our time and money. Luckily for me, I work for an anti-spam company, and get free anti-spam service. Also, as no end to spam is in sight, the anti-spam industry will likely continue to grow with many new competitors entering the field, forcing your anti-spam company to continue to invest in R&D, post blogs, and fight to remain competitive, benefiting you the e-mail user.