The History of Spam

Spam emails have become a common term for those who frequent the online world. They are basically scores of useless emails that one receives when opening the inbox. Spam emails are the counterpart of the junk emails that one usually receives from the frontyard mailbox. Both are totally useless pieces of correspondence that contains nothing more than unwanted ads and the result of overeager marketing specialists to reach out to consumers for their products.

Spam email has become only a fairly recent problem for online users which started to get serious more or less a decade ago. But its history dates back from the 1970's, when the first ever spam mail was sent. It all started on the first week of May in 1978.

A marketing manager for Digital Equipment Corporation named Gary Thuerk is considered to be the world's first spammer. On May 3, 1978, Thuerk sent out an email letter into the ARPAnet, an early network of government and university computers. DEC was a company that has a strong market on the east coast of the country. The west coast on the other hand is another matter.

Thuerk wanted to establish a market for the company's latest computers in the west coast. To introduce DEC's latest offerings at that time, Thuerk decided to hold open houses in Los Angeles to unveil the company's products for interested prospects on the west coast. In order to send invites to those who were interested, Thuerk decided to send an email invitation to over 600 members of the ARPAnet who were mostly composed of computer scientists.

With the help of his technical associate, Carl Gartley, Thuerk sent an email invitation to over 320 members on the ARPAnet and sent another email on the remaining members. And just like today's spam email, it too garnered a lot of negative comments from the recipients. Hence the very first spam was sent. Only then, the term "spam" was not yet used to refer to such mails.

The word "spam" became commonly known to refer to such junk emails sometime during the mid-1990's. More specifically in April of 1994, two lawyers from Phoenix known as Canter and Seigel began sending a mass message advertising their services for the upcoming US green card lottery. Although this was not the first mass posting of messages, it was one of the very first set of emails to be commonly referred to as "spam".