Spam Turns 30: No Birthday Cake Though April 29, 2008

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It’s 30 years ago this week that spam, as we know it, began but no one will be singing Happy Birthday considering it’s become the bane of everyone’s online life.

The first Spam email is attributed to Gary Thuerk, a marketing exec at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) who sent an email on May 3, 1978 to 393 users on Arpanet, a US government computer network that evolved into the Internet.

Even then, people were pissed off and he received direct complaints from recipients and DEC got a wrist-slapping from the network administrators. Did it do any good?

No. Right now, according to New Scientist, 80-90% of all emails are spam – that’s roughly 120 billion messages a day and it’s worth billions of pounds.-Martin Lynch

[New Scientist]

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