A Timeline Of Spam And Antispam

Haak writes "American Scientist has a fine article by Brian Hayes summing up the history of spam and proposed measures to deal with it." A shorter article along the same lines is running at The Economist.

Comments

We owe a lot to anti-spam fighters

[bigberk]

Anti-spam activists go to a lot of trouble to help locate and identify people and groups responsible for flooding the net with spam (or who provide spamware to misinformed laypeople). These same good-doers are often sought out by spammers, sued by groups of them, have their privacy invaded (release of home phone, address) in effort to scare them into shutting up.

I am not kidding here. Take a look at some of the projects that scare the hell out of professional spammers:

spamhaus keeps an exhaustive list of major spam operations.

SPEWS lists areas of the Internet that have frequently be used for spamming, including detailed evidence files and histories of ISPs that turn a blind eye to spam.

Spamware vendor list has a listing of sites that sell spamming software -- without which we would have little or no spam.

And Now...

[Michael's a Jerk!]

According to This Site, The earliest spam was sent by DEC in 1978.

Einar Stefferud, a longtime net hand, reports that DEC announced a new DEC-20 machine in 1978 by sending an invite to all ARPANET addresses on the west coast, using the ARPANET directory, inviting people to receptions in California. They were chastised for breaking the ARPANET appropriate use policy, and a notice was sent out reminding others of the rule.

Interestingly, a young Richard Stallman argued that spammers had every right to send spam.