Domain Registration Related News
Spam's Tenth Birthday Today
March 2004
Ten years ago today, spam as we know it was
born. On 5 March 1994, a message was posted to
some Usenet newsgroups by a law firm called Canter
and Siegel, advertising their services for the
U.S. Green Card lottery. It sounds mild enough
today, but at the time that move and its
follow-ups provoked increasing outrage across the
Net. Many were appalled that "netiquette" - the
unspoken rules that hitherto had maintained order
in cyberspace - had been breached, sensing perhaps
that things would never be the same again.
They were right, of course. By daring to try what
no one had done before, those first spam messages
opened the floodgates to the deluge we battle
daily. When it became clear from Canter and
Siegel's continued postings that their spams were
being neither effectively blocked nor ignored,
others soon followed in their footsteps.
As anyone using the Internet ten years ago will
recall, the wave of Usenet spam that followed
effectively destroyed the usefulness of
newsgroups. This would have been bad enough, but
things did not rest there. The next critical
development was moving from spamming Usenet
newsgroups to spamming individual email addresses.
The initial constraint on email spam was the
difficulty of putting together big enough lists to
compensate for the small response rate. It is
probably no coincidence that the practice of email
spam arose just as the Web was becoming a mass
medium. Its growing popularity, and the natural
tendency of enthusiastic users to include email
contact details on their sites, made address
harvesting easier.
However, almost as soon as the critical list-size
was attained for email spamming to be economically
worthwhile, it proved necessary to include even
more addresses to offset the mounting hostility
towards spam and the corresponding reduction in
response. Spam thus undermined its own
effectiveness, and drove its own escalation.
Unfortunately, in the process of doing so, it also
debased email itself - to the extent that there is
a serious risk that many companies and individual
users will be alienated from email altogether.
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