Thirty years ago today, the phenomenon that was to grow exponentially and become known as spam was born. But despite three decades to learn our lessons, it seems many people still get fooled in to buying products sent to their email inboxes without request.

According to Yahoo News, on May 3rd 1978, a marketer for DEC, a now defunct U.S.computer company, sent out a message to 400 email addresses. The spam, though it wasn’t known as that at the time, was an invite to a product launch.

The industry which has grown up around the practice has changed somewhat since the 1970s, when the Internet was still the US government-run Arpanet. For starters, the sender in 1978 had to input each of those 400 email address individually and by hand, whereas now, the whole operation is handled remotely via botnets.

The practice became known as spam in the 1980s, after the famous Monty Python sketch where a cafe sells Spam meat with everything. This leads a group of invading Vikings to sing the Spam song, which includes the repeating of the word Spam over and over again.

Spam grew substantially once the Internet entered the public domain with the invention of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee in 1983. And it’s still growing, with estimates suggesting it quadrupled between 2004 and 2008.

Spam can vary from adverts for tablets to increase the size of your sexual organs, to miracle weight loss cures, to replica versions of expensive watches. There is also the phishing spam where recipients are invited to give up details of their bank accounts for a share of some sort of hidden wealth.

What’s surprising to hear is how many people fall for spam emails, with Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at IT security company Sophos claiming twelve percent of Internet users have bought something via a spam message at least once.

“Maybe these people are too embarrassed to go to their doctor or they want to save some money, but we have to educate them to report spam, delete spam, but absolutely never buy off spam,”

Personally spam, and the deletion of them has become part of my daily Internet ritual. I never buy anything from them, and very rarely even click on them before deletion. But, if it disappeared tomorrow, I’d probably mourn the passing of a true phenomenon just a little bit.

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Entry was posted on Saturday, May 3rd, 2008 at 12:57 pm under Advertising, Crime, Ecommerce, Internet, Opinion, Spam, Technology.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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