Spam turns 30

This week marks the 30th anniversary of Spam - the abusive and incessant sending of unsolicited bulk messages, according to New Scientist magazine. Now the annoyance of every email account holder, the first unsolicited Spam message was sent out by Gary Thuerk, a marketer at Digital Equipment Corporation. He distributed emails to 393 users of Arpanet - the US-government's own network system that operated before the development of the internet. The message advertised a new computer model. Even then, the message sent by Thuerk was met with a negative response and the Arpanet administrators reprimanded DEC.

Despite the fact that in 2004 Bill Gates promised that the world would be spam-free by 2006 today spam accounts for between 80 to 90% of all emails sent - around 120 billion messages per day. It has been estimated that the global cost of Spam to both ISPs and their customers will be around $140 billion (approx £70 billion) in 2008. John Aycock, a computer scientist at the University of Calgary, Canada shared his views on the future of Spam: "So long as email is still usable, I think spam is just going to be some of the necessary background noise. I think there are enough methods that the bad guys could use to continue to pump out spam for years to come that we're still going to be stuck for a while." Source: New Scientist