Saturday, May 03, 2008

Happy Birthday, Spam

It was thirty years ago today that the first spam was sent.

Gary Thuerk, an employee of a now-defunct computer company, invited 400 people, living on the west coast of America, to a presentation about new addictions to the company's range.

However, it wasn't until April, 1994, when two immigration lawyers, Canter and Siegel, sent a commercial spam message to more than 6,000 discussion groups, that the floodgates were opened.

Today 80%-85% of all e-mail is spam and more than 100 billion spam messages are sent every day.

P.S. It was 1993 when unsolicited commercial e-mail was given the name of spam by Joel Furr, who allegedly got the name from the famous Monty Python sketch.

4 comments:

MissKris said...

I've been very fortunate...knock wood!...not to get much spam in my email accounts. I have one email account for personal mail only and I've always been VERY careful about who I give that one to. My 'public' account gets a little bit here and there. I think one thing I've done that's helped keep it so low is if I buy something online or visit a more 'commercial' site, I always scroll to the bottom of the page to see if any boxes are automatically checked saying I want ads or newsletters or whatever sent to my email. You'd be AMAZED at how many sites have those boxes. I go along and un-check them all, and it's saved me a lot of grief in the long run. As to junk mail, one of our local TV news programs had a segment on how to cut back on that as well and I went to the site and got registered on it. Within a few weeks, our junk mail was cut back to almost nothing. I HATE unsolicited ads/salesmen/telemarketers...well, maybe 'hate' is too strong a word...but I don't like being bothered by phone, snail mail, or email.

Gattina said...

Did you lit a candle to celebrate, lol ? So far I find Spams rather amusing and delete them. Stupidity makes me laugh !

Anonymous said...

I used to get a lot of spam, before I wised up and stopped giving out my email address on various websites. I use this service if a website I'm unfamiliar with demands my email address just to access information. I've also set up an email account with my ISP specifically for online sign-ups. The instant spam starts to arrive, I delete that account and create a new one.

jams o donnell said...

Hmm I don;t know abut celebrating spam's birthday but I will raise a glass at the wake!