THE FIRST UNSOLICITED BULK COMMERCIAL EMAIL IS SENT

Today, The Grandma has been checking their email addresses, and she has paid attention to the great quantity of spam that free accounts generate.

On a day like today in 1978, the first unsolicited bulk commercial email, which would later become known as spam, was sent by a Digital Equipment Corporation marketing representative to every ARPANET address on the west coast of the United States.

Spamming is the use of messaging systems to send multiple unsolicited messages (spam) to large numbers of recipients for the purpose of commercial advertising, for the purpose of non-commercial proselytizing, for any prohibited purpose, especially the fraudulent purpose of phishing, or simply sending the same message over and over to the same user.

While the most widely recognized form of spam is email spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, online classified ads spam, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet forum spam, junk fax transmissions, social spam, spam mobile apps, television advertising and file sharing spam.

It is named after Spam, a luncheon meat, by way of a Monty Python sketch about a restaurant that has Spam in almost every dish in which Vikings annoyingly sing Spam repeatedly.

More information: The History of Spam

Spamming remains economically viable because advertisers have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists, servers, infrastructures, IP ranges, and domain names, and it is difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings. The costs, such as lost productivity and fraud, are borne by the public and by Internet service providers, which have added extra capacity to cope with the volume.

Spamming has been the subject of legislation in many jurisdictions.

A person who creates spam is called a spammer.

The term spam is derived from the 1970 Spam sketch of the BBC television comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus. The sketch, set in a café, has a waitress reading out a menu where every item, but one includes Spam canned luncheon meat. As the waitress recites the Spam-filled menu, a chorus of Viking patrons drown out all conversations with a song, repeating Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam… Lovely Spam! Wonderful Spam!.

The earliest documented spam, although the term had not yet been coined, was a message advertising the availability of a new model of Digital Equipment Corporation computers sent by Gary Thuerk to 393 recipients on ARPANET on May 3, 1978.

Rather than send a separate message to each person, which was the standard practice at the time, he had an assistant, Carl Gartley, write a single mass email. Reaction from the net community was fiercely negative, but the spam did generate some sales.

Spamming had been practised as a prank by participants in multi-user dungeon games, to fill their rivals' accounts with unwanted electronic junk.

More information: Experian

 SPAM is taking e-mail, which is a wonderful tool,
and exploiting the idea that
it's very inexpensive to send mail.

Bill Gates