Accidental Blogger

Well, not that Spam which is more than seven decades old, but this one. Heard the story on C-Span this morning and here is the report in the New Scientist.

Thirty years ago next week, Gary Thuerk, a marketer at the now-defunct computer firm Digital Equipment Corporation, sent an email to 393 users of Arpanet, the US government-run computer network that eventually became the internet. It was the first spam email ever.

That commercial message,, sent on 3 May 1978, drew a swift and negative reaction. Recipients complained directly to Thuerk, who had made no attempt to hide his identity, and DEC was reprimanded by the Arpanet administrators. 

Nevertheless, the email was a portent of things to come. Today, spam makes up 80 to 90% of all emails sent – around 120 billion messages per day – and is a multi-billion dollar industry.

Spam wars

Today spammers target not just email, but also websites, blogs, social networking sites, and cellphones.

And there seems to be no end in sight, as spam-fighters struggle to keep the junk from overwhelming useful communications. Spammers and anti-spammers seem locked in an arms race. No one expects that the fight against spam will be won anytime soon, despite Bill Gates promise in 2004 that the world would be spam-free by 2006.

The first spam message was the product of a more innocent time. Thuerk sent the ad for a new computer model from his own email address, and had a co-worker type in all of the addresses by hand, says Brad Templeton, an internet pioneer, now chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Templeton has documented the first spam on his website.

"Almost everybody who is involved in net issues got pretty interested in spam," he says. "It was the first really bad thing that people started doing on the internet, in terms of letting the small town rules break down and start abusing people."