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."

Comments

Re:Green card lottery spam

[rtb61]

Depends on you email address, the simple ones got buried in spam before the filters kicked in, on hotmail hundreds daily but hey did not care my dead email drop anyhow, so no great loss.

Funny the BBC (the British Bullshit Corporation, as vetted by MI5 to push the conservative political line) because a lot of their news is now basically spam, https://www.thecanary.co/trend.... So the leader of the Labour Opposition with a backdrop of the Kremlin and photoshop hat to look more Russian. Let me guess the British Bullshit Corporation has been secretly celebrating 40 years of spam by producing spam as news for the last year.

They are definately not who they used to be if they ever were. Definite huge Tory political bias, definitely 100% pro war, some of the interviews I have seen were disgustingly pro-war, especially the Syria and Russia stuff, worse than US stuff and that is really saying some thing (they were really sneaky about it though, always pretending to be better than US news, on middle of the range stuff but on the critical stuff even worse, real manipulative, that seems to be their real speciality the UK Government and it's propaganda mouth piece the BBC).