Slashdot Mirror
Celebrating Spam's Ten-Year Anniversary
khalua writes "Netcraft has a story that 10 years ago today, the first widely recognized spam was sent by... oh the irony...a law firm. Hate to see what a beast it grows into when it's 20." Reader prostoalex writes "Ever wonder why spam is so prevalent and who buys all those revolutionary products sold at unbelievable prices? Direct Marketing Association estimates $11.7 billion was spent on goods and services pitched via unsolicited e-mail. The average buy was $155, which exceeds the average of $114 that opt-in e-mail generated. It's worth noting that US e-commerce sales in general generated $50 billion total last year, however, the data was presented by a different researcher."
Come on... that Canter & Siegel green-card-lottery spam-scam wasn't the first spam by a long-shot... maybe the first spam to get written up the print media. Usenet was already littered with off-topic commercial posts and crossposted garbage by then, and unsolicited e-mailings (on a much smaller scale than today) were hardly unheard-of.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
The first spam was sent May 3, 1978 -- 25 years ago . (It was written May 1 but sent on May 3.) The end of the month marks the 11th anniversary of when the first time a USENET posting got named a spam. Once again, Slashdot editors need to start checking the validity of their article before posting.
"Jeremy, you need to get to an internet cafe and cut and paste some appropriate sentiments about me from the world wide
While irritating as hell to many, the sad truth is that spam works. And I know this from first-hand experience (Don't you love AC's!?).
You know all those viagra ads you get? Well chances are it's not from us (I've never met someone who's gotten one of our spams), but maybe you have. In any case, we have margins 100% - 200% higher for people who buy via bulk mail than via other advertising methods, and sales are pretty darn good. I would imagine this isn't too surprising considering the kind of people who would actually respond to spam aren't that wise. In any case, as much as it is hated, it is effective. If it wasn't effective it wouldn't happen.
This is older than 10 years, but Tim Bray tells a funny story about how he might have brought down AOL back in 1988 in response to getting a spam email from someone with the email address lipstick@aol.com.
He launched a job to send an angry response email every 10 seconds. He forgot about it until he heard a couple of guys talking a few days later about how their aol accounts were down over the weekend.
Check it out, it's pretty hilarious.
Four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still. -C. Coolidge
Oddly enough, hormel's spam first appeared on store shelves on March 5, 1937. Heard on the radio this am...
If you do some digging at Brad Templeton's Home Page, his History of Spam has a different version of the history. DEC may have not been the first!
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
This report is mistaken. The first large-scale spamming of Usenet preceeded this one by nearly two months. I remember it well, as I used Usenet pretty heavily at the time.
It wasn't lawyers hawking green cards who really got the ball rolling. It was a religious nut warning us all about the end of the world. On January 17, 1994, Clarence L. Thomas IV (not the Supreme Court guy) spammed all known Usenet groups with a message titled Global Alert For All: Jesus is Coming Soon .
You can see the original message in Google's archives. And you can read about some of the after-effects in RISKS 15.49, from February 1994.
Canter & Siegel, the green card spammers, certainly earned their awful reputation. But they were only ripping off someone else's idea.
And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?
This story is a little old, but back in 1994, Siegel was interviewed by K. K. Campbell. She's just a little out there. You can read the interview here
Zagreus sits inside your head, Zagreus lives among the dead, Zagreus sees you in your bed and eats you in your sleep.
And perhaps you already know this, but the Nigerian scam is named the "419 scam" after the corresponding table in the Nigerian Criminal Code Act. For the lazy among you:
"Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect" -- Linus Torval