The Internet was conceived as a military and educational project, it was never intended to earn money, which means there was no reason to send commercial messages (spam). There was no such thing as spam, just non-commercial e-mails.
The story behind the term “Spam” is one that deals with a comedy sketch by a British comedy actor named Monty Python. In this particular sketch, a man and his wife are in a restaurant trying to place an order, but everything they order contains spam, and while trying to get an order that wasn’t spammed, Vikings sing in the background; “Spam, spam, spam, spam. Wonderful spam! Amazing spam!” This Monty Python episode took place when the internet was just a few computers connected to each other by a telephone wire.
The first spam message is believed to have been written when the internet was named “Arpanet”. It came from an employee of Digital Equipment Corporation. The e-mail was to be sent to all Arpanet users; however, some names were cut off because space was limited.
The exact term for email spam is Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE), although the term Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE) is more commonly used.
The multi-level marketing crowd and porn pushers; These are the scammers where spam is the most popular because it costs so little to send. This is because they ship them out by stealing the resources of others.
In 1986, a man named Dave Rhodes became one of the first to send out what is now considered to be a terrifying form of spam emails. Dave Rhodes was an alleged college student, however there is no record of Dave Rhodes attending a college which he said was so, or even existed at all. The email he allegedly sent advertised a pyramid scheme. This message was posted to a newsgroup called Usenet. Unfortunately, many people probably sent their hard-earned cash to Dave Rhodes only to get nothing in return.
In 1993, a man named Richard Depew wrote a program that removed posts from newsgroups; Ironically, this program had a bug and ended up sending 200 messages to the News Admin Policy newsgroup. This is the first time that a message is called “spam”.
In 1994, two men known as Cantor and Siegel became the two most hated Internet users after they posted an ad to 6,000 newsgroups at the same time.
Today, spam is worse than ever, with over 90 million spam emails being sent every day. It is also estimated that Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, receives four million e-mail messages a year, with the majority being spam.
Over 85% of emails are spam, and this figure shows no sign of slowing down.
