computer science

History of email spam

History of email spam is a computer science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand History of email spam rather than just read about it. In short: The history of email spam reaches back to the mid-1990s, when commercial use of the internet first became possible—and marketers and publicists began to test what was possible. Very soon, email spam was ubiquitous, unavoidable, and repetitive.

Key takeaways

History of email spam belongs to computer science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect History of email spam to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of History of email spam from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The history of email spam reaches back to the mid-1990s, when commercial use of the internet first became possible—and marketers and publicists began to test what was possible. Very soon, email spam was ubiquitous, unavoidable, and repetitive. 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.

The first known spam email The first ARPANET spam was sent in 1971 by an MIT system administrator of CTSS “to all people on CTSS”. In November 1975, Jon Postel wrote RFC 706, "On the junk mail problem," suggesting that the problem of junk electronic mail had been at least contemplated, if not experienced. The first commercial spam electronic mail (although not yet called email), was sent on May 3, 1978, to around 400 users on the ARPANET. It was an advertisement for a presentation by Digital Equipment Corporation for their DECSYSTEM-20 products written by Gary Thuerk, a marketer of theirs, and Carl Gartley, an engineer who sent the message through Thuerk's account. It reportedly generated $13 million in sales. The reaction to it was almost universally negative—an ARPANET representative got Thuerk to promise not to do it again—and for a long time there were no further instances.

USENET

The name "spam" was actually first applied, in April 1993, not to an email, but to unwanted postings on Usenet newsgroup 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", 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 ILOVEYOU computer worm travelled by email to tens of millions of Windows personal computers. Although not spam, its impact highlighted how pervasive email had become. In June 2001, ORBS was sued in New Zealand, and shortly thereafter closed down (see Open Relay Behavior-modification System#Lawsuits for more details). In August 2002, Paul Graham published an influential paper, "A plan for spam", describing a spam-filtering technique using improved Bayesian filtering and variants of this were soon implemented in a number of products. including server-side email filters, such as DSPAM, SpamAssassin, and SpamBayes.

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with History of email spam

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what History of email spam claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In computer science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to History of email spam before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about History of email spam ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of History of email spam

In research: History of email spam appears in computer science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses History of email spam in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: History of email spam is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics History of software, Spamming, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for History of email spam outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study History of email spam in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what History of email spam means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain History of email spam out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is History of email spam in simple terms?

Why does History of email spam matter?

Because it connects several computer science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study History of email spam?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on History of email spam.