History of spamming
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Contents |
[edit] The Dawn of Spam
In the late 19th Century Western Union allowed telegraphic messages on its network to be sent to multiple destinations. Up until the Great Depression wealthy North American residents would be deluged with nebulous investment offers. This problem never fully emerged in Europe to the degree that it did in the Americas, because telegraphy was regulated by national post offices in the European region.
[edit] History of Internet "spam" (1978-Present)
Although spamming has existed on the Internet since as early as 1978, the first major spamming incidents didn't take place until the early 1990s.
Spamming began becoming a major problem at the same time that the Internet began its exponential mainstream expansion in 1993 (also known as Eternal September). More recently, Tim Roarty, using the tag tjroar, spammed across so many internet forums with such a high rate of posting that he is credited with a slow down in overall internet speed. Most major forums have disabled the ability to register as tjroar on their forum due to this problem. It is suspected that tjroar was a collection of irc trojans and they trolled the internet to sign up for forums - fortunately the creator is unable to modify them and they only try to sign up as the user name "tjroar", see spam for more information.
[edit] Origin of the term "spam"
The term spam is widely believed to have derived from the SPAM sketch of the BBC television comedy series "Monty Python's Flying Circus".
The sketch features a small restaurant in which every item on the menu includes SPAM canned meat, and a chorus of Vikings drowning out all conversation with a song consisting almost entirely of the word "SPAM".
- Make money fast
- Serdar Argic
- Canter & Siegel
- The net.kooks
- UUnet and the Usenet Death Penalty
- Sanford Wallace
- Spam attacks and sporgery
- Spam King
- Conviction of spammers to jail, see e.g. Howard Carmack
[edit] References
- History
- Reaction to the DEC Spam of 1978 Overview and text of the first known internet email spam.
This article is part of the Spamming series. | |
---|---|
E-mail spam | DNSBL | Spamhaus | Stopping e-mail abuse | Spambot Address munging | E-mail authentication | Directory Harvest Attack |
Spamdexing |
Google bomb | Keyword stuffing | Cloaking | Link farm | Web ring Referer spam | Blog spam | Spam blogs | Sping | Scraper site |
Telemarketing | Autodialer | Mobile phone spam | VoIP spam |
Scams | Phishing | Advance fee fraud | Lottery scam | Make money fast | Pump and dump |
Misc. | Messaging spam | Newsgroup spam | Flyposting History of spamming |