The history of email spam reaches back to the mid-1990s when commercial use of the internet first became possible[1][2] - and marketers and publicists began to test what was possible.
Very soon email spam was ubiquitous, unavoidable and repetitive.[3] This article details significant events in the history of spam, and the efforts made to limit it.
Background
Commercialization of the internet and integration of electronic mail as an accessible means of communication has another face - the influx of unwanted information and mails. As the internet started to gain popularity in the early 1990s, it was quickly recognized as an excellent advertising tool. At practically no cost, a person can use the internet to send an email message to thousands of people. These unsolicited junk electronic mails came to be called 'Spam'. The history of spam is intertwined with the history of electronic mail.
While the linguistic significance of the usage of the word 'spam' is attributed to the British comedy troupe Monty Python in a now legendary sketch from their Flying Circus TV series, in which a group of Vikings sing a chorus of "SPAM, SPAM, SPAM..." at increasing volumes, the historic significance lies in it being adopted to refer to unsolicited commercial electronic mail sent to a large number of addresses, in what was seen as drowning out normal communication on the internet.[4]
The "first spam email" in 1978
The first known spam electronic mail (although not yet called email), was sent on May 3, 1978 to several hundred users on ARPANET. It was an advertisement for a presentation by Digital Equipment Corporation for their DECSYSTEM-20 products sent by Gary Thuerk, a marketer of theirs.[5]
The reaction to it was almost universally negative, and for a long time there were no further instances.
The name "spam" was actually first applied, in April 1993, not to an email, but to unwanted postings on Usenetnewsgroup network. Richard Depew accidentally posted 200 messages to news.admin.policy and in the aftermath readers of this group were making jokes about the accident, when one person referred to the messages as “spam”,[6] coining the term that would later be applied to similar incidents over email.
On January 18, 1994, the first large-scale deliberate USENET spam occurred. A message with the subject “Global Alert for All: Jesus is Coming Soon” was cross-posted to every available newsgroup.[7][8] Its controversial message sparked many debates all across USENET.
In April 1994 the first commercial USENET spam arrived. Two lawyers from Phoenix, Canter and Siegel, hired a programmer to post their "Green Card Lottery- Final One?" message to as many newsgroups as possible.[8][9][10] What made them different was that they did not hide the fact that they were spammers. They were proud of it, and thought it was great advertising. They even went on to write the book "How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway: Everyone’s Guerrilla Guide to Marketing on the internet and Other On-Line Services". They planned on opening a consulting company to help other people post similar advertisements, but it never took off.
The 1990s
MAPS ("Mail Abuse Prevention System") was founded in 1996. Dave Rand and Paul Vixie, well known internet software engineers, had started keeping a list of IP addresses which had sent out spam or engaged in other behavior they found objectionable. The list became known as the Real-time Blackhole List (RBL). Many network managers wanted to use the RBL to block unwanted email. Thus, Rand and Vixie created a DNS-based distribution scheme which quickly became popular.[11]
Spam was already becoming a serious concern, leading in late 1997 to the MAPS, which was "blackhole list" to allow mail servers to block mail coming from spam sources.
Others started DNS-based blacklists of open relays.
Alan Hodgson started Dorkslayers in September 1998. By November 1998 he was forced to close, since his upstream BCTel considered the open relay scanning to be abusive. The successor ORBS project was then moved to Alan Brown in New Zealand.[12]
Al Iverson of Radparker started the RRSS around May 1999. By September 1999 that project was folded into the MAPS group of DNS-based lists as the RSS.
In August 1999, MAPS listed the ORBS mail servers, since the ORBS relay testing was thought to be abusive.
2000, spam becomes a serious problem
The SpamAssassin spam-filtering system was first uploaded to SourceForge.net on April 20, 2001 by creator Justin Mason.
In May 2000 the ILOVEYOUcomputer worm travelled by email to tens of millions of Windows personal computers.[13] Although not spam, its impact highlighted how pervasive email had become.
In August 2002, Paul Graham published an influential paper, "A plan for spam",[14] describing a spam-filtering technique using improved Bayesian filtering[15][16] and variants of this were soon implemented in a number of products.[17] including server-side email filters, such as DSPAM, SpamAssassin,[18] and SpamBayes.[19]
2003, the fight to control spam
In June 2003 Meng Weng Wong started the SPF-discuss mailing list and posted the very first version of the "Sender Permitted From" proposal, that would later become the Sender Policy Framework, a simple email-validation system designed to detect email spoofing as part of the solution to spam.
The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 was signed into law by PresidentGeorge W. Bush on December 16, 2003, establishing the United States' first national standards for the sending of commercial email and requiring the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to enforce its provisions. The backronym CAN-SPAM derives from the bill's full name: "Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003". It plays on the word "canning" (putting an end to) spam, as in the usual term for unsolicited email of this type; as well as a pun in reference to the canned SPAM food product. The bill was sponsored in Congress by Senators Conrad Burns and Ron Wyden.
In May 2004, Howard Carmack of Buffalo, New York was sentenced to 3½ to 7 years for sending 800 million messages, using stolen identities. In May 2003 he also lost a $16 million civil lawsuit to EarthLink.[23]
On September 27, 2004, Nicholas Tombros pleaded guilty to charges and became the first spammer to be convicted under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.[24] He was sentenced in July 2007 to three years' probation, six months' house arrest, and fined $10,000.[25]
On November 4, 2004, Jeremy Jaynes, rated the 8th-most prolific spammer in the world, according to Spamhaus, was convicted of three felony charges of using servers in Virginia to send thousands of fraudulent emails. The court recommended a sentence of nine years' imprisonment, which was imposed in April 2005 although the start of the sentence was deferred pending appeals. Jaynes claimed to have an income of $750,000 a month from his spamming activities. On February 29, 2008 the Supreme Court of Virginia overturned his conviction.[26]
On July 25, 2005, Russian spammer Vardan Kushnir, who is believed to have spammed every single Russian internet user, was found dead in his Moscow apartment, having suffered numerous blunt-force blows to the head. It is believed that Kushnir's murder was unrelated to his spamming activities.[28]
On November 1, 2005, David Levi, 29, of Lytham, England was sentenced to four years for conspiracy to defraud by sending emails pretending to be from eBay. His brother Guy Levi, 22, was sentenced to 21 months after pleading guilty to conspiracy to defraud, and four others were each sentenced to six months for money laundering.[29]
In January 2006, James McCalla was ordered to pay $11.2 billion to an ISP in Iowa, U.S. and barred from using the internet for 3 years for sending 280 million email messages. In court, he was not represented by an attorney.[31]
On June 28, 2006, IronPort released a study which found 80% of spam emails originating from zombie computers. The report also found 55 billion daily spam emails in June 2006, a large increase from 35 billion daily spam emails in June 2005. The study used SenderData which represents 25% of global email traffic and data from over 100,000 ISP's, universities, and corporations.
On August 8, 2006, AOL announced the intention of digging up the garden of the parents of spammer Davis Wolfgang Hawke in search of buried gold and platinum.[32] AOL had been awarded a US$12.8 million judgment in May 2005 against Hawke, who had gone into hiding. The permission for the search was granted by a judge after AOL proved that the spammer had bought large amounts of gold and platinum.[33] In July, 2007, AOL decided not to proceed.[34]
On October 27, 2006, the Federal Court of Australia fined Clarity1 A$4.5 million (US$3.4 million; euro2.7 million) and its director Wayne Mansfield A$1 million (US$760,000; euro600,000) for sending unsolicited emails in the first conviction under Australia's Spam Act of 2003.[36]
In November 2006, Christopher William Smith (aka Chris "Rizler" Smith) was convicted on 9 counts for offenses related to Smith's spamming.
On May 30, 2007, notorious spammer Robert Soloway was arrested after having been indicted by a federal grand jury on 35 charges including mail fraud, wire fraud, email fraud, identity theft, and money laundering.[39] If convicted, he could face decades behind bars.[40] Bail was initially denied although he was released to a half way house in September. On March 14, 2008, Robert Soloway reached an agreement with federal prosecutors, two weeks before his scheduled trial on 40 charges. Soloway pleaded guilty to three charges - felony mail fraud, fraud in connection with email, and failing to file a 2005 tax return.[41] In exchange, federal prosecutors dropped all other charges. Soloway faced up to 26 years in prison on the most serious charge, and up to $625,000 total in fines. On 22 July 2008 Robert Soloway was sentenced four years in federal prison.[42]
On June 25, 2007, two men were each convicted on eight counts including conspiracy, fraud, money laundering, and transportation of obscene materials in U.S. District Court in Phoenix, Arizona. The prosecution is the first of its kind under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, according to a release from the Department of Justice.[43] One count for each under the act was for falsifying headers, the other was for using domain names registered with false information. The two had been sending millions of hard-core pornography spam emails.[44] The two men were sentenced to five years in prison and ordered to forfeit US$1.3 million.[45]
2008
On July 20, 2008, Eddie Davidson "the Spam King" walked away from a federal prison camp in Florence, Colorado. He was subsequently found dead in Arapahoe County, Colorado, after reportedly killing his wife and three-year-old daughter, in an apparent murder-suicide.[46]
August 19: A survey on Marshal Limited's website (an email and internet content security company) showed that 29% of the 622 respondents had bought something from a spam email. Other studies, one by Forrester Research in 2004, which surveyed 6,000 active Web users, reported 20 percent had bought something from spam, while a 2005 study by Mirapoint and the Radicati Group showed 11%, and 57% indicated that clicking on a link in spam caused them to receive more spam than before.[47] A 2007 study by Endai Worldwide (an email marketing company) showed 16% had bought something from spam.[48] In response to the Marshal study, the Download Squad started their own study. With 289 respondents, only 2.1% indicated they had ever bought something from a spam email.[49]
November 11: McColo, a San Jose, California-based hosting provider identified as hosting spamming organizations, was cut off by its internet providers. It is estimated that McColo hosted the machines responsible for 75 percent of spam sent worldwide. McColo's upstream service was severed on Tuesday, November 11; that same afternoon, organizations tracking spam noted a sharp decrease in the volume being sent; some as much as a half.[50]
See also
Laura Betterly, one of the first bulk commercial emailers
Spamming is the use of messaging systems to send multiple unsolicited messages (spam) to large numbers of recipients for the purpose of commercial advertising, non-commercial proselytizing, or any prohibited purpose, or simply repeatedly sending the same message 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.
Various anti-spam techniques are used to prevent email spam.
alt.sex is a Usenet newsgroup – a discussion group within the Usenet network – relating to human sexual activity. It was popular in the 1990s. An October 1993 survey by Brian Reid reported an estimated worldwide readership for the alt.sex newsgroup of 3.3 million, that being 8% of the total Usenet readership, with 67% of all Usenet "nodes" carrying the group. At that time, alt.sex had an estimated traffic of 2,300 messages per month.
The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act of 2003 is a law passed in 2003 establishing the United States' first national standards for the sending of commercial e-mail. The law requires the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to enforce its provisions. Introduced by Republican Conrad Burns, the act passed both the House and Senate during the 108th United States Congress and was signed into law by President George W. Bush in December 2003 and was enacted on January 1, 2004.
Email spam, also referred to as junk email, spam mail, or simply spam, is unsolicited messages sent in bulk by email (spamming). The name comes from a Monty Python sketch in which the name of the canned pork product Spam is ubiquitous, unavoidable, and repetitive. Email spam has steadily grown since the early 1990s, and by 2014 was estimated to account for around 90% of total email traffic.
Address munging is the practice of disguising an e-mail address to prevent it from being automatically collected by unsolicited bulk e-mail providers. Address munging is intended to disguise an e-mail address in a way that prevents computer software from seeing the real address, or even any address at all, but still allows a human reader to reconstruct the original and contact the author: an email address such as, "no-one@example.com", becomes "no-one at example dot com", for instance.
A Joe job is a spamming technique that sends out unsolicited e-mails using spoofed sender data. Early Joe jobs aimed at tarnishing the reputation of the apparent sender or inducing the recipients to take action against them, but they are now typically used by commercial spammers to conceal the true origin of their messages and to trick recipients into opening emails apparently coming from a trusted source.
Sanford 'Spamford' Wallace is an Internet spammer. He initially sent junk faxes before coming to notoriety in 1997, promoting himself as the original "Spam King". Wallace's prolific spamming has resulted in encounters with the United States government, anti-spam activists, and large corporations such as Facebook and MySpace.
Shane Atkinson, of Christchurch, New Zealand was a major spammer whose details were leaked onto the Internet soon after an article was written about him in the New Zealand Herald. After he was exposed as a spammer in 2003, Shane Atkinson found himself at the receiving end of a barrage of public outrage and proclaimed that he would give up spamming.
Trespass to chattels, also called trespass to personalty or trespass to personal property, is a tort whereby the infringing party has intentionally interfered with another person's lawful possession of a chattel. The interference can be any physical contact with the chattel in a quantifiable way, or any dispossession of the chattel. As opposed to the greater wrong of conversion, trespass to chattels is argued to be actionable per se.
Email marketing is the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. It involves using email to send advertisements, request business, or solicit sales or donations. Email marketing strategies commonly seek to achieve one or more of three primary objectives: build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. The term usually refers to sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing a merchant's relationship with current or previous customers, encouraging customer loyalty and repeat business, acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately, and sharing third-party ads.
Email harvesting or scraping is the process of obtaining lists of email addresses using various methods. Typically these are then used for bulk email or spam.
Wayne Mansfield, of Perth, Western Australia, was the head of direct marketing business T3 Direct Marketing, operating under a series of two-dollar companies, and in 2005 became the first Australian to be prosecuted for email spamming.
Robert Alan Soloway is the founder of the so-called "Strategic Partnership Against Microsoft Illegal Spam," or SPAMIS, but is said to be one of the Internet's biggest spammers through his company, Newport Internet Marketing (NIM). He was arrested on May 30, 2007, after a grand jury indicted him on charges of identity theft, money laundering, and mail, wire, and e-mail fraud. He was nicknamed the "Spam King" by prosecutors.
A spamtrap is a honeypot used to collect spam.
A Usenet personality was a particular kind of Internet celebrity, being an individual who gained a certain level of notoriety from posting on Usenet, a global network of computer users with a vast array of topics for discussion. The platform is usually anonymous, although users can get celebrity status, usually by being deemed different from other posters in some way.
Usenet, USENET, or, "in full", User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages to one or more topic categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to the Internet forums that have become widely used. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSes, though posts are stored on the server sequentially.
CompuServe Inc. v. Cyber Promotions, Inc. was a ruling by the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio in 1997 that set an early precedent for granting online service providers the right to prevent commercial enterprises from sending unsolicited email advertising – also known as spam – to its subscribers. It was one of the first cases to apply United States tort law to restrict spamming on computer networks. The court held that Cyber Promotions' intentional use of CompuServe's proprietary servers to send unsolicited email was an actionable trespass to chattels and granted a preliminary injunction preventing the spammer from sending unsolicited advertisements to any email address maintained by CompuServe.
America Online, Inc. v. IMS, 24 F. Supp. 2d 548 was one of a series of legal battles America Online launched against junk e-mail. In this case, the court held that defendants' unauthorized mailing of unsolicited bulk e-mail constituted a trespass to chattels under Virginia state law.
↑ "Installation". Ubuntu manuals. 2010-09-18. Archived from the original on 29 September 2010. Retrieved 2010-09-18. Gary Robinson's f(x) and combining algorithms, as used in SpamAssassin
↑ "Background Reading". SpamBayes project. 2010-09-18. Archived from the original on 6 September 2010. Retrieved 2010-09-18. Sharpen your pencils, this is the mathematical background (such as it is).* The paper that started the ball rolling: Paul Graham's A Plan for Spam.* Gary Robinson has an interesting essay suggesting some improvements to Graham's original approach.* Gary Robinson's Linux Journal article discussed using the chi squared distribution.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
