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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."
Tracking the money comes up every year at the MIT spam conference, or used to. It doesn't work. The cost of prosecution is so high, the international abuse from outlaw countries like Nigeria and Estonia are so high, and the "legitimate" spam vendors are such a part of modern business and advertising that laws will not be passed and vendors lobby to protect their spam business. Even the EFF got corrupted and sold out, when Jerry Berman took over the EFF and sold their soul to sign off on the CANSPAM act.
Actually, there is one spam filter that has proven 100% effective, with individual training for individual spam recipients properly implemented. It is called CRM114, it's, free software, GPL licensed, and available at http://crm114.sourceforge.net/ . It's Markovian neural net based rather than static Bayesian rules like most filters, does not predefine rules, and is normally individually trained for each user with no visibility for spammers to tune their messages.
The authors of the first Usenet spam were lawyers, disbarred in multiple states for fraud against their clients. They also tried to start a business selling spam services to others, which had a short profitable period until their level of fraud and abuse against their network providers and their own clients became clear.
Some businesses engage in spam accidentally, because they are sold advertising services and don't understand the idea that "opt-in" email is accepted while "opt-out" is almost always unwanted, The vast majority, however, is abusive fraud. It remains a profound burden on every email system in the world, even those with good spam filtering, because there is a measurable cost of the filtering that generally far exceeds that for legitimate services.