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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.
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
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.
This message is not spam.
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 do the same with spam emails. I print them out and make briquettes. I saves me loads of money.
-- Make America hate again!
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.