What was the first spam email ever sent?

Answer 1

Gary Thuerk, a marketer, is generally credited with sending the first spam email on May 3, 1978. It wasn't well received, but he maintains that he did nothing wrong. Nowadays, spam makes up 53 percent of all emails.

Thuerk actually composed the fateful message on May 1st, but it didn't go out until a couple days later (that's why copies of the email show the earlier date). He sent it to about 400 people on ARPANET, an early precursor to the internet primarily used by scientists and researchers.

The goal of the message was to sell computers for DEC, an East Coast company that was attempting to build a presence on the West Coast. The company's newest computers offered ARPANET support right out of the box, and Thuerk thought that Arpanet users would appreciate the feature.

Here's part of the text of the email (and yes, it was written in all caps):

DIGITAL WILL BE GIVING A PRODUCT PRESENTATION OF THE NEWEST MEMBERS OF THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY; THE DECSYSTEM-2020, 2020T, 2060, AND 2060T. THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY OF COMPUTERS HAS EVOLVED FROM THE TENEX OPERATING SYSTEM ND THE DECSYSTEM-10 COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE. BOTH THE DECSYSTEM-2060T AND 2020T OFFER FULL ARPANET SUPPORT UNDER THE TOPS-20 OPERATING SYSTEM.

[...]

WE INVITE YOU TO COME SEE THE 2020 AND HEAR ABOUT THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY AT THE TWO PRODUCT PRESENTATIONS WE WILL BE GIVING IN California THIS MONTH.

Arpanet users immediately responded, annoyed that the message took up a sizable amount of space. Some questioned whether it was ethical to advertise on ARPANET, while a few were annoyed that they weren't included on the original message--the conversation was a huge talking point for the network's users, so some people felt left out.

Despite the mostly negative reaction, Thuerk managed to sell a few computers.

"The whole idea was tell as many people as possible," he told The Los Angeles Times in 2003. "Any other method--making phone calls, writing real letters--would have been much more expensive and taken much more time."

"I was the pioneer," he noted. "I saw a new way of doing things."

Still, he decided not to pursue the tactic on ARPANET, fearing a public relations disaster for his clients. For years, the network was free from spam.

Of course, that changed over time, and by the early 1990s, commercial email advertisements were commonplace, but they weren't called "spam." A software trainer named Joel Furr was the first person to use the word to refer to the ads, but he notes that the term was already in common usage in chat forums.

"In the early days of the internet, usage of the Net was restricted primarily to people who worked at or were students at universities," Furr told NPR. "Being university students, we were all very familiar with Monty Python."

In those days, chat rooms were...chaotic.

"It was just a lot of people typing all at once," Furr explained. "And when you would have 100 or more people all logged into these systems all at the same time, it could be very hard to follow what people were typing. It was like being in a room full of people all talking at once. And consequently whenever it got really noisy online, somebody would eventually start just typing, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam..."

That was a reference to a Monty Python sketch in which a man tries to order food at a restaurant; the cook gives him a list of meal options, all of which include the meat product Spam.

Furr says he was the first one to use the term to refer to mass advertisements on USENET groups; it quickly became shorthand for unwanted advertisements of any kind, and eventually, it became the go-to term for unwanted emails.

While spam blockers have gotten better, most of us still skim through a few unnecessary advertisements while checking our mail every day. We can thank Thuerk for starting the trend--and Furr for bringing us the terminology.