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Forty Years of Spam Email (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The BBC has a video celebrating the 40th birthday of spam email. Here's a transcript of the video: "It is 40 years since the first spam email was sent. Marketer Gary Thuerk composed an email selling his company's newest computers and sent it to 400 users on ARPANET, which was the network that become the basis for the internet. Why is it called spam? It has been suggested that it was called spam after a song in a Monty Python sketch. Where patrons of a cafe were repeatedly offered something they didn't want. The concept of spam is nothing new. Unsolicited telegrams were sent over 100 years ago and we've come to accept junk mail as part of everyday life. Now [nearly 60%] of all email is spam. Like most rubbish, it can be found everywhere on earth."
In the another 40 years the problem will be astronomically worse. In fact if all we do is keep trying to filter out spam, the problem will almost certainly be unbeatable within another decade. The spammers know that they are slowly winning the war against the filters as the signal:noise ratio keeps coming down ever so slightly as they get a little more spam through with each iteration. They know that the complement to this is that more legitimate communication ends up getting automatically junked by the same filters, which means that eventually the filters stop being useful.
The only way to end this problem going forward is to finally look at spam for what it is. Spam is an economic problem. Spammers don't send you spam to make you mad or to waste your time. Spammers send you spam to make money, plain and simple. The only way to end it is to stop them from making money on it. You can't legislate it away by throwing arbitrary penalties at spammers - we've even heard of spammers being murdered on the street and it didn't stop more spammers from coming up to take their place. The only way to stop spam is to stop them from getting paid.
This has been shown effective before. We need to track down how they are getting paid - it most often is based on click-throughs so we need to find who owns the spamvertised domain - and interfere with it. If the money doesn't get to the spammer, they no longer have a reason to send spam.
Everything else is a waste of time, money, storage, more money, and more time.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I really hate those unsolicited telegrams. I don't want or need any of your dag blum miracle liniment, consarn it!
#DeleteChrome
It time we take this seriously with serious consequences.
60 of e-mail is spam, so that 60% wasted bandwidth and 60% wasted power on the server, and all the routers and infrastructure. An utterly disgusting waste of resources that the ones responsible for needs to be severely punished over.
I wonder what the impact of spam has been to Spam (The trademarked processed meat product). Would the company still be in business if its name wasn't mentioned millions of times a day because of something completely unrelated?
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
That's why there's still so much of it, even despite its environmental impact.
The big companies listened to your distaste for being offered products you do not need.
Solution:
find out what you do need by invading privacy tracking and spying
luckily where I live a "NO JUNK MAIL" sign on the mailbox blocks 99% of that. once that filter fell off for about a week and I was honestly shocked at how much shit really is stuffed into mailboxes.
You have to go to your post office and tell them that you consider the catalogs "sexually provocative" and, after they finish laughing at you, point them to Rowan v. Post Office Dept., under which they have to accept your judgment about the catalogs and may not substitute their own opinion.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I could never stop junk mail coming into my mailbox. So I decided to valorize it instead: years ago, I gave my adress to many stores, and in short order, I started receiving a lot of junk mail. As in, a LOT of junk mail.
What do I do with all that junk mail you ask? I make briquettes to throw in the fire in the winter. 3/4th of my heating needs are taken care of by that free fuel, delivered for free right on my doorstep. In the summer, I store the briquettes, and if I have too many of them, I sell them to the local recycler, who pays a token sum for it by the ton and burns it in our local power plant.
Making the briquette is a bit of a pain, even with the briquette machine, and they require sweeping the chimney more often because burning glossy paper fouls it up real fast. Also, burning the chemicals contained in the paper and in the ink isn't terribly green. But it results in real savings in heating fuel.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
CPA... WTF r u doing writing about this.
[($)]
Marketer Gary Thuerk composed an email selling his company's newest computers and sent it to 400 users on ARPANET
Marketers, just like Lawyers, giant radioactive lizards, and Old Ones, are best left deep in the ocean, unless you really need them.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Sorry :/
[($)]
I am not one of the privileged few who was on ARPANET in 1978: I was at high school and in the wrong country.
I was, however, present for a somewhat later milestone in spam history: the green card lottery spam. On 12 April 2994, a pair of exceptionally unscrupulous lawyers spammed every newsgroup on Usenet with ads for (utterly unnecessary and very expensive) assistance in entering a lottery for USA green card (permanent residence.) This generated a great deal of internet hatred.
https://www.wired.com/1999/04/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
If some losers need to spam to make a dollar... scraping bottom of the barrel.
[($)]
This message is not spam.
...META-SPAM is a modern invention!
Dear all,
as you may have noticed today you are receiving
some SPAM messages.
You are kindly asked to not respond to them.
Our office is working hard to stop them
and prevent their spread.
In case you already answered to those email,
we kindly ask you to immediately change
your account password.
Sincerely,
IT Services
From http://www.email-anti-patterns.com/#/p-metaspam
I feel that the real problem that allows spam to thrive is due to the horrible protocol that's used. Sure, with improvements like SPF, DKIM, and the like, it's a lot better, however I feel we need to move to a more modern protocol.
Anything with a form of proof of work should cut down spam drastically. After users have confirmed legitimate mail from that MTA, allow an exception to be made, preventing the proof of work, or at least a more intensive version.
I have a fireplace insert for heating. it's not an open fire - no smoke, no cancer. For cooking, I have an electric stove. And for hot water, I use my regular heating fuel boiler. That's why I said burning the paper briquettes only covers 3/4th of my heating needs.
But thanks for immediately assuming I'm a dumbass...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
It is the credits at the end.
Just watch the credits roll and you see the word "Spam" inserted everywhere.
Just like the junk messages littering you inbox, interspersed with the real messages.
Written and spam performed by:
Spam Terry Jones
Michael Spam Palin
John Spam John Spam
John Spam Cleese
Graham Spam Spam
Spam Chapman
etc..
...and 40 years of users clicking on spam. When will they learn?
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
I thought the original SPAM was cross-posted News (NNTP) postings. Wasn't it only later applied to emails?
I would appreciate the input of a neckbeard here.
Take off every 'sig' !!
That's why there's still so much of it, even despite its environmental impact.
Right. Because it is the Post Off who decides if their clients will use their services or not, of course.
I do the same with spam emails. I print them out and make briquettes. I saves me loads of money.
-- Make America hate again!
You're OK. But people who use wood burning stoves as their primary heat source have been warned. Apparently, for many of these stoves, they allow teeny tiny microscopic particles to escape and get into lungs.
In WWII Britain, Spam, which is essentially pig heads run through a grinder, was shipped by the ton to feed American troops. At war's end the Americans left but all the surplus Spam remained. As Britain recovered this lingering pink reminder of the American occupation showed up in markets and menus everywhere. The Monty Python skit was a play on that.
When my buddy insisted DKIM would eliminate SPAM and I just wasn't smart enough to understand why. I'd email him but his inbox is full again so...
Hey Shawn! You're STILL WRONG!
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
This was the case at one company that I worked and ran their Postfix servers that handled the Internet traffic. It was pretty nuts...
Nov 23, 1987 - 1st documented use of the word "spam" to describe unwanted electronic correspondence.
Ads are still a problem of the net. Yes, I said ads. Because what the fuck is spam other than that? Whether the junk litters your inbox or your browser real estate, what exactly is the difference?
A spam filter and an ad filter are essentially doing the same, getting rid of unwanted junk nobody asked for.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So then they will route all the catalogs to me? Sweet!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
It's not called spam because they kept being offered spam. It's called spam because they kept repeating the word spam.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
god I love /.
I work for BigBlue...the amount of spam(corporate spam) that I receive daily is by way higher than the spam I had in my personal yahoo mailbox in 2001.