Celebrating Spam's Ten-Year Anniversary

khalua writes "Netcraft has a story that 10 years ago today, the first widely recognized spam was sent by... oh the irony...a law firm. Hate to see what a beast it grows into when it's 20." Reader prostoalex writes "Ever wonder why spam is so prevalent and who buys all those revolutionary products sold at unbelievable prices? Direct Marketing Association estimates $11.7 billion was spent on goods and services pitched via unsolicited e-mail. The average buy was $155, which exceeds the average of $114 that opt-in e-mail generated. It's worth noting that US e-commerce sales in general generated $50 billion total last year, however, the data was presented by a different researcher."

Re:That's Who

[Em Emalb]

Sounds like this was an opportunity for you to explain to her it was a scam and perhaps educate one more person....ah hell, who am I kidding?

Stupid twit prolly wonders how all those people "found her". Prolly likes to speak with telemarketers too.

Gah.

*sigh*....

[tekiegreg]

As long as Spam continues to be profitable (and apparently increasingly so), I fear we may never really see the end of it. Even if SMTP protocols are revised, even if Internet postage is applied to emails, as long as you're doing better revenues over your expenses, which in most cases you are, then there is no hope.

Tho I may sound resigned and defeated to e-mail's evenutal fate, there are alternates. Instant messaging is easier controlled (I never get any Spam, but then I don't allow people on my buddy list to IM me). IRC and other online chats are tough to pollute as well.

In short my prediction is in 10 years I will have completely ditched my email address and I will be giving friends my ICQ UIN/AOL Handle/Yahoo Handle in lieu of it.

Ok I'm through ranting, time for everyone else to.

I'm old...

[FatRatBastard]

You know you're no longer a snotty nosed geek when you can remember Canter & Siegel. Back in the days when you said "the internet" most people thought "Usenet", not "the Web." I think I still have an old O'Reiley book Using the Internet or some such thing were mention of the "World Wide Web" was relegated to an Appendix.

here's a good mail filter

[juggaleaux]

On my Yahoo! mail account I set up a filter that sends anything with "unsubscribe" to the trash automatically. My spam went WAY down. :)

Re:"First"?

[Rupert]

I was pretty heavily into Usenet in 1995. C&S caused a huge increase in the number of posts in the groups I subscribed to. Mostly, those were people complaining about C&S, but it was a pretty significant event, even for netizens.

C&S huge innovation was that it *wasn't* cross-posted. They left a bot running all weekend to post identical messages to every newsgroup. That's why it was such a bitch to cancel them all.

Mail Enhancement Drugs

[ackthpt]

Other ways of viewing this auspicious occasion:

Mourning Spam's Ten Year Anniversary

Ten Years of Spam Adversity

Ten Years of the most villainous scum (outside of Mos Eisley) crawling out of the woodwork

Ten Years of some putz trying to get $25,000,000 out of a bank account somewhere in the world

Ten Years of geeks valiantly slugging it out on the front lines of the conflict while Washington dithers

Ten Years abusing free speech in another vein

Ten Years watching a valuable resource be clogged by the low rung of the evolutionary ladder

Re:"First"?

[no longer myself]

Heck, I remember when it hit FIDO net during my old BBS days over 10 years ago. I distictly remember objecting to it back then, and was flamed for trying to limit "freedom of speech".

Re:That's Who

[Spetiam]

seriously, just out of curiosity, has anyone here actually bought something because of a spam ad or know somebody that did?

but here's the real question: why??

Re:"First"?

[Radical Rad]

I never got unsolicited emails back then even (for quite a while) after Canter and Siegel. The commercial cross posts that you refer to were usually just to the few usenet groups that were somewhat relevant to the product or service. Canter and Siegel hit every single newsgroup!

Re:"First"?

[Cowboy Bebop]

I have a much earlier spam. [templetons.com] And I bet people here could reply with even earlier ones.

Re:Yeah, right

[HarveyBirdman]

Unfortunately, it cannot be viewed as a cost. It's $11.7 billion in more sales, and those sales employed people. The money didn't just evaporate, it changed hands, and that's good for an economy.

Oh, I remember it well

[Call Me Black Cloud]

Back in the halcyon days of grad school, this...this...ad! shows up in a newsgroup I favored. I dashed off an e-mail them (several, in fact) including many full copies of their post. I encouraged my fellow students to do the same.

We were quite happy to learn later the flood of mail took down their server. Yes, there I was riding the crest of the spam fighting movement without even knowing it. And at the time it was just a break from Netrek and posting via anon.penet.fi...

This message has no point. Just some memories of an old guy. Did I ever tell you about programming the Commodore PETs in the math department in high school? It was like this...

Wasn't this the year

[Gr8Apes]

that AOL connected up to USENET? I personally thought that was the death of decent newsgroups.

To much admin time on email before spam

[chamilto0516]

C&S invented the SPAM concept on Usenet. I remember that it was not only meant to hit each group but that it was not cross-posted correctly (at all) and that you couldn't delete/kill/read(to be marked read) that message in one group and have it gone from all the other groups. This was a double no-no and wrong on more than one level.

Since SPAM has propogated on to email, I am reminded of my favorite lines out of the Unix Haters Handbook [mit.edu].

The thing that gets me is that one of the arguments that landed Robert Morris, author of "the Internet Worm" in jail was all the sysadmins' time his prank cost. Yet the author of sendmail is still walking around free without even a U (for Unixery) branded on his forehead. -- An email from dm at hri dot com dated 12-Oct-93 in Garfinkle, Weise and Strassman;

Unix Haters Handbook; May, 1994; IDG Books Worldwide

The interesting thing is that all this was published before the C&S Usenet spamming. How much time are admins spending on email management now?

SPAM has killed Usenet's usefullness for me. At least filters like Popfile [sourceforge.net] and such are keeping SPAM over email bearable; even if they are not fixing the problem.

How many times?

[Stonent1]

I submitted a story about a year ago that said SPAM was 20 years old according to the BBC, (going by USENET spam) But I could have swore the anniversary of spam story has been here several times.

Re:I'm old...

[TastyWords]

I'm old enough to have coined the phrase "the world's biggest secret club" many years ago. There are exceptions, but [for the most part] about the only way you knew about the Internet was if you were on it (and if you weren't on it, you likely didn't know about it).

What really helped get the ball rolling was Kroll's book in the fall of '92 (Sep/Oct) Around Jan/Feb '93, it hit the computer best-selling lists (yes, there are separate lists for those things) and the major publishing houses scrambled to catch up, despite being forewarned (before Kroll's book was published[1]) about the topic.

You're also old if you've seen an X-Files episode with the Lone Gunmen and they show the timeline to be 1990 and have a browser/GUI on a PC (and you spot this yourself). Consider that was the WWW in its infancy...

p.s. ([1]those parties also turned down "DOS for Dummies").

damn lies and statistics: 11.7b in spam sales? No

[Drake42]

I like the quote: "estimates $11.7 billion was spent on goods and services pitched via unsolicited e-mail" coming from people who want you to by their unsolicited e-mail services. Does anyone really trust this number, or does it seem totally made up?

And if you believe that number I have a new marketing technique for you called 'Silent Marketing'. Just pay me a few thousand dollars and your product will be available to millions of potential buyers! Billions of dollars were spent over the web this year, so obviously my marketing idea will generate billions of dollars for you! Never mind what the idea is, other people are making money so if you give me money, you'll be making money too!

Re:"First"?

[Lord Apathy]

I was very active in usenet when this shit hit. I was running a smail uucp node using Matt Dillons uucp software and was subscribing to 40 or 50 newsgroups on a Amiga 500. I remember seeing that shit in all the newsgroups that I had. Hell, back then I would get unsolicited email all the damn time, but the difference being it was always from somebody and usually worth my time to reply to.

Them was the good old days. Usenet was useful and email was the best communication tool there was. Even if you where piping it out over a 2400 bps modem in a forward and store method.

God damn Fuckers...I hope they die a horrable death and burn in hell forever.

Re:"First"?

[AppyPappy]

You are CORRECT, sir.

Usenet was a haven for "GET RICH QUICK!!" and "ADD YOUR NAME" scams. Everyone was getting rich in those days. Some usenet groups were nothing but get rich schemes. I was always amazed that people would offer their address so willingly. But then, their cousin always knew someone who got rich doing it.

When the email spam started, people went haywire. But I don't think anyone ever imagined it would explode like today.

Re:"First"?

[bugnuts]

That's it... I couldn't remember the name. This is the first non-crossposted mass-spamming I remember.

The funniest MST3K fan-parody I ever saw was of that post. Here's the MST3k parody [google.com] which also includes the end of the world article, too.

Re:Typo

[martin-k]

Usenet is as usable today as it has always been. Just get a Usenet provider with _heavy_ spam filtering (for example, individual.de, which is free), and Usenet is a wonderful experience.

-Martin

Re:kinda scary...

[wfbush]

Paul Graham has the answer to this, in one of his articles about Bayesian filtering:

That's the whole problem: spammers waste the time of a million people just to reach the 15 stupidest or most perverted.

The people who are responding to spam are stupider than the ones that go for the "It's, like 3 bucks on a hundred! And they're open late!" check-cashing services.

Yah, I'm an insesitve clod.

What I want to know is...

[Space_Soldier]

How many spamers are celebrating the 10th anniversary in a tribunal or jail?

Cruel and Unusual Punishment

[Brandybuck]

Direct Marketing Association estimates $11.7 billion was spent on goods and services pitched via unsolicited e-mail.

I say we go back to the days of stocks, pillories and public humiliation in an effort to stop spam. You get caught buying something via spam, you get hauled to the city square, shackeled to a post, and the rest of us get to throw rotten tomatoes at you. For example, buy Cialis and you get to spend your "special weekend" in the stocks.

Re:That's Who

[ultranova]

If they offered anything worthwile, they would be offering it in a shop or by some other legitimate means. If they offered anything anyone would actually want to buy (based on it's real merits, not the description spammers give), they wouldn't need to resort to spam.

After all, a legitimate insurance salesman won't break down your door and start telling you how everything is so fragile nowadays and how you really need an insurance to protect those fragile kneecaps of yours.

And yes, comparing spam and other kind of organized crime is appropriate. Spammers lead large organizations to circumvent various laws and live under a (very thin) veil of legitimacy. They make their money by selling dubious products; since some of these products are medicanes, I find it highly likely that at least some people have already died because of them (and AFAIK people have disappeared trying to get back money lost to Nigerian scams). Spammers also attack viciously against anyone who trys to stop them (remember the recent stories of DDOS attacs against anti-spam websites ?).

The only difference between the spammers and the Mafia is that no one attachs any amount of glamour to spammers.

Re:"First"?

[chickenwing]

The idea of free speech is that people who you do not agree with have the right to express their views.

It is interesting that we have come to a time where corporations (legally equivilant to humans, but with out any of the responsibilities) have more free speech rights than people (remember, money is legally equivalent to speech, but without any of the responsibilies).

So, non-taxpaying legal person entities have the right to use their free speech to help elect our leaders.

Translation...

Corporations are allowed to use money to install a figurehead to help further disempower and enslave regular people.

Remember the great promise of the internet is that any regular person can put their silly ideas up for other regular people to read (like i'm doing now). Just wait until the free-marketers allow one company to own every switch between you and anyone else, then we will see.

I guess this seems a little off topic, but I guess what really bothers me is when corporate entities cry that their free speech is being impeded upon, especially when they use that power to silence real flesh and blood human-beings.