The history of spam emails

The Internet started as a military and educational project, it was never intended to be 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 resolved around the comic sketch of a British comedy act 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’re trying to get an order that isn’t spammed, there are Vikings singing in the background; “Spam spam spam spam. Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!” This episode of Monty Python existed when the Internet was simply a few computers connected to each other via a telephone cable.

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 at Arpanet; however, some names were cut because space was limited.

The exact term for spam is Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE), although you’ll see the term Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE) used more frequently.

The multi-level marketing crowd and the porn traffickers; These are the scammers that spam is most popular with because it costs them so little to send. This is because they send it by 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 terrible form of spam. Dave Rhodes was a purported college student, however there is no record of Dave Rhodes ever attending the college he said he attended or actually existed. The email he allegedly sent advertised a pyramid scheme. This message was posted to a newsgroup called Usenet. Sadly, a lot of people probably handed over their hard-earned money to Dave Rhodes just to get 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 being 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 to 6,000 newsgroups at the same time.

Today, spam is worse than ever with over 90 million spam emails being sent every day. Microsoft creator Bill Gates is also estimated to receive four million emails a year, with spam making up the vast majority.

Over 85% of emails are spam and this number shows no signs of slowing down.