Spam, Then and Now
The first unsolicited mass email
was sent May 3rd, 1978 by a sales representative of DEC (now owned
by Compaq). According to Wikipedia's article on Spam:
In the 1980s the term was adopted to describe certain abusive users who frequented BBSs and MUDs [similar to modern chatrooms], who would repeat "SPAM" a huge number of times to scroll other users' text off the screen. This act … came to be called spamming as well. By analogy, the term was soon applied to any large amount of text broadcast by one user …
In 1994, unsolicited commercial spam was born, as two lawyers began sending messages
advertising their green-card paperwork service.
Spam is today defined as unsolicited commercial e-mail – mail sent to get you to buy
software, medications, personal enhancement products, computers, movies, etc. that you did not
request. (The term is also sometimes used to refer to the way that
computer viruses may be transmitted through e-mail. When you get
junk mail that seems to contain random words or only a picture or a
program, that's more likely to be a virus than commercial spam.)
Nowadays, spammers use slick commercial software packages to send
spam. This allows them to send spam to hundreds of thousands of
people at the click of a button, without even knowing who those
people are.
Spam programs use various methods to find out your e-mail address.
You don't have to have posted your address on the Internet – or, in
some cases, even have used it – for it to be targeted for spam.
These programs do a lot of guessing – they'll mail to common
first and last names and random combinations of 2-3 characters at
every domain they can think of. They search through online
directories and extract all the e-mail addresses therein. They do
web page searches and pull addresses off of these. When
combined with viruses, they actually suck addresses out of the
address book of the person whose machine they've infiltrated.
In some cases, they are able to observe transmission information
to obtain lists of mailing list subscribers and high mail users.
The picture sounds bleak, but using the many techniques to combat spam, you can enjoy a relatively undisturbed inbox.
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