Mac GUI City :: 30 Years of Spam

cactus · **Citizen** Topic Starter

BBC report: Spam reaches 30-year anniversary

Spam - the scourge of every e-mail inbox - celebrates its 30th anniversary this weekend.

The first recognisable e-mail marketing message was sent on 3 May, 1978 to 400 people on behalf of DEC - a now-defunct computer-maker. The message was sent via Arpanet - the internet's forerunner - and won its sender much criticism from recipients. Thirty years on, spam has grown into an underground industry that sends out billions of messages every day.

Statistics gathered by the FBI suggest that 75% of net scams snare people through junk e-mail. In 2007 these cons netted criminals more than $239m (��121m). Statistics suggest that more than 80%-85% of all e-mail is spam or junk and more than 100 billion spam messages are sent every day. The majority of these messages are being sent via hijacked home computers that have been compromised by a computer virus.

I'm not sure that this is something to be celebrated, but clearly a noteworthy anniversary.

Dog Cow · **Mayor**

The Internet would be a lot faster if people weren't slowing it down with their spam crap.

heavymetal4god · **Citizen**

Dog Cow wrote:

Quote: The Internet would be a lot faster if people weren't slowing it down with their spam crap.

Oh without a doubt, I hate typing a website wrong and getting the generic "insert wrongly spelled webpage name here" *what you need, when you need it*