The history of email spam reaches back to the mid-1990s when commercial use of the internet first became possible - and marketers and publicists began to test what was possible.
Very soon email spam was ubiquitous, unavoidable and repetitive. This article details significant events in the history of spam, and the efforts made to limit it.
Background
Commercialization of the internet and integration of electronic mail as an accessible means of communication has another face - the influx of unwanted information and mails. As the internet started to gain popularity in the early 1990s, it was quickly recognized as an excellent advertising tool. At practically no cost, a person can use the internet to send an email message to thousands of people. These unsolicited junk electronic mails came to be called 'Spam'. The history of spam is intertwined with the history of electronic mail.
While the linguistic significance of the usage of the word 'spam' is attributed to the British comedy troupe Monty Python in a now legendary sketch from their Flying Circus TV series, in which a group of Vikings sing a chorus of "SPAM, SPAM, SPAM..." at increasing volumes, the historic significance lies in it being adopted to refer to unsolicited commercial electronic mail sent to a large number of addresses, in what was seen as drowning out normal communication on the internet.
The "first spam email" in 1978
The first known spam electronic mail (although not yet called email), was sent on May 3, 1978 to several hundred users on ARPANET. It was an advertisement for a presentation by Digital Equipment Corporation for their DECSYSTEM-20 products sent by Gary Thuerk, a marketer of theirs.
The reaction to it was almost universally negative, and for a long time there were no further instances.
USENET
The name "spam" was actually first applied, in April 1993, not to an email, but to unwanted postings on Usenet newsgroup network. Richard Depew accidentally posted 200 messages to news.admin.policy and in the aftermath readers of this group were making jokes about the accident, when one person referred to the messages as “spam”, coining the term that would later be applied to similar incidents over email.
On January 18, 1994, the first large-scale deliberate USENET spam occurred. A message with the subject “Global Alert for All: Jesus is Coming Soon” was cross-posted to every available newsgroup. Its controversial message sparked many debates all across USENET.
In April 1994 the first commercial USENET spam arrived. Two lawyers from Phoenix, Canter and Siegel, hired a programmer to post their "Green Card Lottery- Final One?" message to as many newsgroups as possible. What made them different was that they did not hide the fact that they were spammers. They were proud of it, and thought it was great advertising. They even went on to write the book "How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway : Everyone’s Guerrilla Guide to Marketing on the internet and Other On-Line Services". They planned on opening a consulting company to help other people post similar advertisements, but it never took off.
The 1990s
MAPS ("Mail Abuse Prevention System") was founded in 1996. Dave Rand and Paul Vixie, well known internet software engineers, had started keeping a list of IP addresses which had sent out spam or engaged in other behavior they found objectionable. The list became known as the Real-time Blackhole List (RBL). Many network managers wanted to use the RBL to block unwanted email. Thus, Rand and Vixie created a DNS-based distribution scheme which quickly became popular.
Spam was already becoming a serious concern, leading in late 1997 to the MAPS, which was "blackhole list" to allow mail servers to block mail coming from spam sources.
Others started DNS-based blacklists of open relays.
Alan Hodgson started Dorkslayers in September 1998. By November 1998 he was forced to close, since his upstream BCTel considered the open relay scanning to be abusive. The successor ORBS project was then moved to Alan Brown in New Zealand.
Al Iverson of Radparker started the RRSS around May 1999. By September 1999 that project was folded into the MAPS group of DNS-based lists as the RSS.
In August 1999, MAPS listed the ORBS mail servers, since the ORBS relay testing was thought to be abusive.
2000, spam becomes a serious problem
The SpamAssassin spam-filtering system was first uploaded to SourceForge.net on April 20, 2001 by creator Justin Mason.
In May 2000 the ILOVEYOU computer worm travelled by email to tens of millions of Windows personal computers. Although not spam, its impact highlighted how pervasive email had become.