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."

Comments

"First"?

[tverbeek]

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.

Slashdot once again behind the times.

[mrshowtime]

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.

It's True! Spam works.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Happy spam anniversaries

[ultraslacker]

Oddly enough, hormel's spam first appeared on store shelves on March 5, 1937. Heard on the radio this am...

1978: The first internet E-mail spam, sent by DEC

[stuffduff]

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!

This was the SECOND.

[Mechanist]

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.