On the day I decided to write about this topic, I had a message in one of my instant messaging platforms. One look at it, and it was obviously a spam message coming from a business unit trying to plug their products. It wasn’t the first time I was getting that message, nor will it be the last time — despite the fact that I never signed up for it in the first place and irrespective of how many more times I mark their messages as spam. 

Often containing information that would be classified as promotional or advertising, spam corresponds to the large number of undesired messages that is flooding the internet. While the methodology or means by which it is done predates the internet (think of those single-page paper advertisements or pamphlets that are surreptitiously included in your newspaper or magazines, for instance), spam messages online have become all-pervasive. With these messages now also containing phishing content, links and attachments that spread malware, and cyber scams to trap the gullible, the harm created by them has increased manifold. It all started with certain individuals trying to push their own commercial interests. 

First known case of electronic spam 

Did you know that the first known electronic spam message was sent even before much of the world knew about emails? Or, for that matter, even before the invention of the World Wide Web? This is because it actually took place in the ARPANet (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) — a precursor to the internet that was established by the U.S. Department of Defense late in the 1960s to connect researchers who were geographically spread across the world. 

The man behind this first instance of spam was Gary Thuerk, whose company, Digital Equipment Corporation, made computers. Based in Boston, Massachusetts, Thuerk’s company had a strong presence in the east coast of the U.S. and he wished to bring in the west coast into his sphere of influence. He realised that the ARPANet was a place that held computer enthusiasts from across the nation, and what he had to do was to get his message across. 

Printed directory

While the idea of a printed directory of all internet users might sound bewildering to you, the ARPANet had one such list of users with their email addresses. Thuerk got his project manager to manually transcribe around four hundred email addresses that were selected based on the fact that they were residents of the west coast of the U.S. 

Thuerk framed the message that was sent out to these four hundred email addresses himself and they include portions that have gone on be part of many many spam messages since — text in all caps! The wordings advertised upcoming product demonstrations for the DECSYSTEM-2020, -2020T, -2060, and -2060T computers that were scheduled to be held in San Mateo, California, and at the Los Angeles Airport. 

Commercial success, cultural loss

The email, which was sent to 397 ARPANet users on May 3, 1978, led to $12 million in sales from the two product demonstrations. According to Thuerk, nearly 40 people turned up for these demos, corresponding to a response rate of nearly 10% as one in every 10 initial recipients had turned up. The spam had definitely worked in getting the message across and also commercially.

But human beings, as you might have noticed by now, come in all shapes and sizes. While 1 in 10 turned up for the demos, it meant that 9 out of every 10 who didn’t want anything to do with it had been disturbed for no reason. Socially, the ad invaded privacy and led to outrage. 

“This was a flagrant violation of the use of Arpanet as the network is to be used for official US Government business only!” Major Raymond Czahor, who was the chief of the ARPANet Management Branch, is believed to have remarked. Guardrails to ban further such activity were raised and Thuerk was actually made to promise never to do something like this again. The seeds, however, had been sown and while cultural etiquette kept spam messages at bay for over a decade, they came back with vengeance in the 1990s.

The “Green Card Lottery” notice

For nearly 16 years after Thuerk’s trial, the ARPANet and its successors somehow stayed clear of spam messages, even as the technology around packet-switching and connection protocols were growing in leaps and bounds. When the next big spam finally made its way, English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web was still finding its footing. 

With the advent of the Web, the internet ceased to be just the place where government agencies and researchers collaborated and shared information. The birth of hypertext and Web browsers meant that the technology was exploding, and the commercial possibilities weren’t ignored by venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. 

Just like Thuerk, Arizona-based immigration lawyers Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel saw spamming as a means of enhancing their business. As lawyers who offered advisory services, they decided to put out an advertisement targeting aspiring immigrants. They were offering to handle the paperwork, which was basically sending a postcard to a specific government address. 

Over 5,500 groups targeted

On April 12, 1994, over 5,500 groups in the online bulletin board network Usenet found themselves recipients of the “Green Card Lottery – Final One?” spam message. Just like how Thuerk had done it, some of the text in Canter and Siegel’s ad was in all caps, a forerunner of things to come. 

Again, the reaction was similar to how it panned out for Thuerk. It generated a lot of business for the pair as they made somewhere between $100,000 to $200,000 without investing much for starters. It also led to a storm of criticism for the breach of informal rules.

Before the husband-and-wife duo divorced in 1996, Canter and Siegel came up with a book titled How to Make a FORTUNE on the Information Superhighway: Everyone’s Guerrilla Guide to Marketing on the Internet and Other On-Line Services — still available online if you wish to pick one up — even as they copped more hate for what they had unleashed online. The Tennessee Supreme Court barred Canter from practising law owing to his “egregious” email marketing, changing his life forever. 

Rise of spam

Users of the internet, meanwhile, developed software that were capable of finding and deleting the offending ad from the bulletin boards —  some of the earliest spam filters. In the decade that followed, spam was continually on the rise, with a peak constituting of 90% of all email traffic in the 2000s! 

With government regulations to combat spam catching up, and with technology creating better filters for spam messages, their volume has been reduced from that high. Spam, however, continues to be a scourge on all our networks, as they continue to be sent across online communication channels, be it emails, social media, instant messaging platforms, and, of course, SMS.

Where does the word “spam” come from? 

While the word spam has come to mean junk messages on the internet, it has an interesting etymology. The word itself could have been a conflation (the merging of two or more sets of information, texts, ideas, etc. into one.) of SPiced hAM. The word spam was first a proprietary name registered in 1937 by Geo. A. Hormel & Co. in U.S. As the years went by, the word was soon being used for all other kinds of canned meat as well. 

While the figurative sense of bland or unexciting came by 1959, the meaning “internet junk mail” came about in 1993. This was coined by Usenet users after software developer Richard Depew accidentally sent the same post 200 times to an online discussion group on March 31, 1993. A little over a year later, Canter and Siegel spammed on purpose.

In case you are wondering why the Usenet users coined the word “spam” for what had happened in 1993, that has a small back story too. The term had already been used in online text games, and actually derived from a 1970 sketch on the British television show “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”. In that, a reading of a restaurant’s menu where every dish is laden with “spam” (the meat) turns into an endless repetition of the word, along with a chorus of Vikings that drowns out all conversation. It symbolises the repetitive, overwhelming nature of these messages, and hence spam has taken this meaning.