From Brad Templeton Web pages:
Canter and Siegel
The term got really popular in April of 1994, when two lawyers from Phoenix named Canter and Siegel posted a message advertising their fairly useless services in an upcoming U.S. "green card" lottery. They had posted their message a few times before, but on April 12, they hired an mercenary programmer to write a simple script to post their ad to every single newsgroup (message board) on USENET, the world's largest online conferencing system. There were several thousand such newsgroups, and each one got the ad.
Quickly people called it a "spam" and the word caught on. Future multiple postings soon got the appelation. Some people also applied it to individual unwanted ads that weren't posted again and again, though generally it was associated with the massive flood of the same message. It turns out, however, that the term had been in use for some time before the famous green card flood.
Later, some particularly nasty folks figured they could take mass e-mailing software (which had been around for decades to handle mailing lists) and use it to send junk e-mail to large audiences who hadn't asked for it. The term quickly came to be used to describe these unwanted junk e-mails, and indeed that is the most common use of the term today.
In fact, the earliest documented junk e-mailing I've uncovered was sent May 3, 1978 -- 25 years ago this month. (It was written May 1 but sent on May 3.) And in a surprising coincidence (*), just a month ago marked the 10th anniversary of March 31, 1993, the first time a USENET posting got named a spam.
I learned of that first spam through a report from Einar Stefferud who read a history I prepared of the term "spam" and how the name of the canned ham became our name for junk e-mail. I had original set out to research the history of the term, but it became impossible not to research a bit of the history of the act.
That first spam was sent by a marketer for DEC - Digital Equipment Corporation. Today, you may not know DEC, since it was bought by Compaq and is now a unit of HP, but in those days it was the leading minicomputer maker, and its computers provided the platform for the development of Unix, C and much of the internet, to cite just a few minor events.
By 1978 the Arpanet (as the internet was then known) had already provided network E-mail to a large number of folks at universities, government institutions and universities for over 6 years. E-mail was the biggest source of traffic on the Arpanet. A few years prior, Dave Farber had created "MsgGroup," the first network mailing list. (Though Plato and other timesharing systems had laid the foundations for online community and conferencing some years before that.)
The DEC marketer, Gary Thuerk, identified only as "THUERK at DEC-MARLBORO" (There were no dots or dot-coms in those days, and the at-sign was often spelled out) decided to send a notice to everybody on the ARPANET on the west coast. In those days there was a printed directory of everybody on the Arpanet which they used as source for the list. The message trumpeted an open house to show off new models of the Dec-20 computer, a foray into larger, almost mainframe-sized systems.
This was a spam, though the term would not be used to refer to it for another 15 years. Thuerk had his technical associate, early DEC employee Carl Gartley, send the message from his account after several edits. Alas, at first he didn't do it right. The Tops-20 mail program would only take 320 addresses, so all the other addresses overflowed into the body of the message. When they found that some customers hadn't got it, they re-sent to the rest.
US lays first spam chargesTed Bridis in WashingtonAPRIL 29, 2004
US authorities have charged four people in Detroit with emailing fraudulent sales pitches for weight-loss products, the first criminal prosecutions under the country's new "can spam" legislation.Court papers identified the four as Daniel J. Lin, James J. Lin, Mark M. Sadek and Christopher Chung, all believed living in suburban Detroit. They were accused of disguising their identities in hundreds of thousands of email sales pitches and delivering emails by bouncing messages through unprotected relay computers on the internet.
Messrs Chung and Sadek appeared in US District Court and were released on unsecured bonds, said Gina Balaya, a spokeswoman for the US Attorney's Office. The Lins have not been arrested.
Authorities said their company sold a weight-loss patch under the corporate names AIT Herbal, Avatar Nutrition, Phoenix Avatar and others. The companies allegedly operated out of Detroit and nearby communities of West Bloomfield and Birmingham.
"These people were sending spam emails to at least a million people," Ms Balaya said.
Officials at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) told US postal investigators they had received more than 10,000 complaints about unwanted emails sent by the company.
Investigators said they consulted Dr. Michael D. Jensen, a medical professor at the Mayo Medical School, who confirmed that ingredients in the weight-loss product sold in the disputed emails wouldn't work.
The "can spam" legislation, which went into effect January 1, requires unsolicited emails to include a mechanism so recipients can indicate they do not want future mass mailings.
Want to have some fun? do a search on "Strangest spam"
How about the names?
Tyree Perkins
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