The Internet started as a military and educational project, it was never used to make money, which means there was no reason to send commercial mail (spam). There was no spam, just emails of a non-commercial nature.
The story behind the term ‘Spam’ is one that is resolved around the sketch of a British comedy called Monty Python. In this particular sketch, a man and his wife are in a restaurant trying to place an order, but everything they ordered was spammed and while they were trying to get an order that was devoid of spam, there are Vikings singing in the background; “Spam, spam, spam, spam. Beautiful spam! Wonderful spam!” This episode of Monty Python existed when the Internet was simply a few computers connected to each other via telephone cables.
The first spam email is believed to have been written when the internet was called ‘Arpanet’. It came from an employee of Digital Equipment Corporation. The email was meant to be sent to everyone on Arpanet; however, some names were cut because space was limited.
The exact term for spam is Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE), although you will see that the term Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE) is used more frequently.
The multilevel marketing crowd and the promoters of pornography; These are the scammers that spam is most popular with because it costs very little to send. This is because they send it stealing the resources of others.
In 1986, a man named Dave Rhodes became one of the first people to send what is now considered a gruesome form of spam messages. Dave Rhodes was a supposed college student, however there is no record that Dave Rhodes ever attended the college that he said he attended or actually existed. The email he was said to have sent advertised a pyramid scheme. This message was posted to a newsgroup called Usenet. Sadly, many people probably sent their hard-earned money to Dave Rhodes only to receive nothing in return.
In 1993, a man named Richard Depew wrote a program that would remove posts from newsgroups; Ironically, this program had a bug and ended up posting 200 messages to the news management policy newsgroup. This is the first instance of messages that are called “spam”.
In 1994, two men known as Cantor and Siegel became two of the most hated users on the Internet after posting an ad on 6,000 newsgroups at the same time.
Today spam is worse than ever, with over 90 million spam emails being sent every day. Microsoft’s creator Bill Gates is also estimated to receive four million emails a year, with spam making up a vast majority.
More than 85% of emails are spam and this number shows no signs of slowing down.
