Spam Is 30 Years Old

holy_calamity writes "New Scientist commemorates spam's 30th anniversary, a week from today. The first spam message — archived here — was sent to 393 users of ARPANET on May 2, 1978 by someone from computing pioneers DEC. They had to type in all the addresses by hand first."

Comments

One Thing That's Changed

[eldavojohn]

As you see below, the mail program would only accept 320 addresses. The rest overflowed into the body of the message. When they found some recipients had not gotten it, they re-sent the message to the rest of the recipients. According to Thuerk, they were unaware of the "address file" function in the mail program that would have enabled a mailing list. Unfortunately, one thing that's changed is that spammers have become far more sophisticated and clever. Sometimes I analyze a piece of spam that gets caught and when it's at my office's Exchange Inbox, funny things happen. Like I show up as the sender, receiver and subject of the message! Only when I inspect the e-mail do I find that they are using some sort of Exchange exploit to make it appear this way while the actual subject is--you guessed it--viagra (and no, my name is not Viagra)!

In the spirit of the history of Spam, I think it also bears mentioning something I didn't see in the article: a Usenet phrase "Eternal September" which was September of 1993. An exponential growth of spam and gullible users ensured constant income for spammers and provided the initial hit of income for people like The Spam King (I won't even dignify him with printing his name). They've been chasing the dragon ever since at the expense of the hardware and software of the internet. And to think that if the spammers had missed that initial exposure of thousands of people willing to "increase what she prefers your size XXL no one will know you use works 100%" then we might not be in the situation we are today.

Judges today should force spammers to work with law enforcement and security companies to figure out how to stop others before they even start. If not for an initial hit of funding, I doubt any spammer would continue.

I love this bit...

[fm6]

ON 2 MAY 78 DIGITAL EQUIPMENT CORPORATION (DEC) SENT OUT AN ARPANET MESSAGE ADVERTISING THEIR NEW COMPUTER SYSTEMS. THIS WAS A FLAGRANT VIOLATION OF THE USE OF ARPANET AS THE NETWORK IS TO BE USED FOR OFFICIAL U.S. GOVERNMENT BUSINESS ONLY. APPROPRIATE ACTION IS BEING TAKEN TO PRECLUDE ITS OCCURRENCE AGAIN.

IN ENFORCEMENT OF THIS POLICY DCA IS DEPENDENT ON THE ARPANET SPONSORS, AND HOST AND TIP LIAISONS. IT IS IMPERATIVE YOU INFORM YOUR USERS AND CONTRACTORS WHO ARE PROVIDED ARPANET ACCESS THE MEANING OF THIS POLICY.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION.

MAJOR RAYMOND CZAHOR

CHIEF, ARPANET MANAGEMENT BRANCH, DCA Did Major Czahor have a 6-bit terminal, or was he just indulging in the traditional military fondness for capital letters? But what's really funny is that he doesn't care about the spamming as such, he just wants to remind everybody that the network was for "U.S. Government Business Only". Which is laughable, since unofficial use of ARPANET was rampant, especially in 1978. That's how Zork got developed, with its authors writing it in pieces and using feedback from the ARPANET community to improve the game. There was also an excellent database of limericks; a friend with ARPANET access was good enough to print it out for me, but I've long since lost it. Anybody seen it online? For that matter, is there a PDP-10 emulator somewhere running the original Zork? Not the Fortran port (which never had the complete game) the original MDL version.

Nov 23, 1987 - 1st documented use

[notthepainter]

Nov 23, 1987 - 1st documented use of the word "spam" to describe unwanted electronic correspondence.

See http://tinyurl.com/4jg5w4 (the url is a tinyurl that links to a google groups posting)

And yes, I'm the one who said that back then, and no, I didn't think I was doing anything big, it just seemed, well, obvious at the time.

Paul Czarnecki Cezanne