Celebrating Spam's Ten-Year Anniversary 275
khalua writes "Netcraft has a story that 10 years ago today, the first widely recognized spam was sent by... oh the irony...a law firm. Hate to see what a beast it grows into when it's 20." Reader prostoalex writes "Ever wonder why spam is so prevalent and who buys all those revolutionary products sold at unbelievable prices? Direct Marketing Association estimates $11.7 billion was spent on goods and services pitched via unsolicited e-mail. The average buy was $155, which exceeds the average of $114 that opt-in e-mail generated. It's worth noting that US e-commerce sales in general generated $50 billion total last year, however, the data was presented by a different researcher."
"First"? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:"First"? (Score:5, Interesting)
C&S huge innovation was that it *wasn't* cross-posted. They left a bot running all weekend to post identical messages to every newsgroup. That's why it was such a bitch to cancel them all.
Typo (Score:2)
But Usenet was still useable in 1995. It wasn't until later that it degenerated to the state it's in today.
Re:Typo (Score:4, Interesting)
-Martin
Re:"First"? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:"First"? (Score:5, Interesting)
It is interesting that we have come to a time where corporations (legally equivilant to humans, but with out any of the responsibilities) have more free speech rights than people (remember, money is legally equivalent to speech, but without any of the responsibilies).
So, non-taxpaying legal person entities have the right to use their free speech to help elect our leaders.
Translation...
Corporations are allowed to use money to install a figurehead to help further disempower and enslave regular people.
Remember the great promise of the internet is that any regular person can put their silly ideas up for other regular people to read (like i'm doing now). Just wait until the free-marketers allow one company to own every switch between you and anyone else, then we will see.
I guess this seems a little off topic, but I guess what really bothers me is when corporate entities cry that their free speech is being impeded upon, especially when they use that power to silence real flesh and blood human-beings.
Re:"First"? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:"First"? (Score:4, Interesting)
I was very active in usenet when this shit hit. I was running a smail uucp node using Matt Dillons uucp software and was subscribing to 40 or 50 newsgroups on a Amiga 500. I remember seeing that shit in all the newsgroups that I had. Hell, back then I would get unsolicited email all the damn time, but the difference being it was always from somebody and usually worth my time to reply to.
Them was the good old days. Usenet was useful and email was the best communication tool there was. Even if you where piping it out over a 2400 bps modem in a forward and store method.
God damn Fuckers...I hope they die a horrable death and burn in hell forever.
Re:"First"? (Score:5, Interesting)
With a Stallman reply to it even. (Score:2)
4) Would a dating service for people on the net be "frowned upon" by DCA? I hope not. But even if it is, don't let that stop you from notifying me via net mail if you start one.
Yes mister Stallman. There are now many dating services for people on the net. I'm sure you've gotten plenty of unsolicited mail about them by now.
You missed RMS's follow-up (Score:2)
He seems to have had trouble grasping the nature of SPAM before he saw it personally.
Re:"First"? (Score:5, Funny)
Nor was it the first extreme newsgroup spamming. It missed that by a few weeks.
The very first, excruciatingly-painful, extreme Usenet spamming was the "The End of the World is Coming!" by some Jesus-freak. Someone generated cancels for it, and then sent out a message "The End of the World has been Cancelled."
C&S, however, were the first couple of dedicated spammers that proclaimed "we will spam, and be happy to sue anyone that disagrees!"
Re:"First"? (Score:2)
Clarence Thomas IV, IIRC. It was right after yet another California earthquake.
Re:"First"? (Score:3, Interesting)
The funniest MST3K fan-parody I ever saw was of that post. Here's the MST3k parody [google.com] which also includes the end of the world article, too.
Re:"First"? (Score:2)
Of course that was also near the end of being able to retaliate by sending people copies of your generic OS kernel in the mail.
I miss the fronteir days before Al Gore paved a Interstate through the town called Internet
Re:"First"? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:"First"? (Score:3, Interesting)
Usenet was a haven for "GET RICH QUICK!!" and "ADD YOUR NAME" scams. Everyone was getting rich in those days. Some usenet groups were nothing but get rich schemes. I was always amazed that people would offer their address so willingly. But then, their cousin always knew someone who got rich doing it.
When the email spam started, people went haywire. But I don't think anyone ever imagined it would explode like today.
Re:"First"? (Score:2)
That's Who (Score:5, Funny)
I'll tell you who buys this stuff:
I had an aquaintence who surfing the web while we were in the library one time and freaked out all of a sudden. She went up to ask the librarian if she wouldn't be able to get her "prize" she just "won" because she was in a library and the "web people" wouldn't know where to find her...
That is who buys this stuff.
Re:That's Who (Score:4, Interesting)
Stupid twit prolly wonders how all those people "found her". Prolly likes to speak with telemarketers too.
Gah.
Re:That's Who (Score:3, Funny)
Even after I told them it was just a scam they didn't quite believe me. I showed the javascript in the source where it was obviously just a simple countdown timer. Still didn't really believe me.
A friend of mine told me his father was about to go to amsterdam to meet
Re:That's Who (Score:4, Interesting)
but here's the real question: why??
Re:That's Who (Score:5, Funny)
Re:That's Who (Score:3, Insightful)
-Martin
Re:That's Who (Score:5, Funny)
Mmmmm, if only my female acquaintances were so gullible......wait, I don't have any female acquaintances. I've wasted my life with this damn computer!!!
Re:That's Who (Score:5, Funny)
Re:That's Who (Score:3, Funny)
Remember those annoying 'punch the monkey and win $20' ads?
I had an account exec, mid 30's college educated woman pulling down something in the $30-35k salary range call me (tech, natch) into her office *** specificaly to ask me where her $20 was ***.
Perhaps she's the mom of the dumb bitch you mention?
Re:That's Who (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not a stats major but I -was- a marketing major (I have since killed myself) and I very much doubt that DMA has a field of 1000 unbiased consumers in their survey, and a sample of 1000 to project 11 billion dollars of purchases? colour me sceptical.
I mean, "The Online Newspaper of Record for Online Marketers" sounds almost exactly like "spamdot: News for spammers" to me.
the survey is sketchy
the projections are sketchy
the source is sketchy.
my life remains unaltered.
Why can't... (Score:5, Funny)
$11.7 billion... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:$11.7 billion... (Score:2, Insightful)
Is this some Soviet Russia thing?
kinda scary... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:kinda scary... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd never thought of the Correlation... (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe there's an obvious correlation here that we just don't see because we are web-saavy.
myke (aka "The Tripod")
Re:kinda scary... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:kinda scary... (Score:4, Funny)
One of my wife's friends (IQ=Bag of hammers) decided to buy birth control from some online pharmacy she saw in a piece of spam...
Needless to say, she's due in August. (Yes, this is the same pharmacy that got in trouble for selling birth control pills with no birth control in them...)
10 years... (Score:5, Funny)
Ok, I'm done now...
*sigh*.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Tho I may sound resigned and defeated to e-mail's evenutal fate, there are alternates. Instant messaging is easier controlled (I never get any Spam, but then I don't allow people on my buddy list to IM me). IRC and other online chats are tough to pollute as well.
In short my prediction is in 10 years I will have completely ditched my email address and I will be giving friends my ICQ UIN/AOL Handle/Yahoo Handle in lieu of it.
Ok I'm through ranting, time for everyone else to.
Re:*sigh*.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:*sigh*.... (Score:4, Insightful)
The difference between email and IM is one of modes of communication, and they're both valuable modes. IM has immediacy; email has time-shifting. One does not entirely substitute for the other.
You're right that the spammers will not stop. They will shift to wherever the money is. If they find that they can no longer send email for free, then they will shift to IM, until that route is protected, too.
They're already starting to explore other domains. Spam comments have started showing up in people's web logs, and I'm sure there's a lot of it in Slashdot, too. We don't see much of it because it's mostly moderated down or rejected by the lameness filters, but when attention is turned to it, the war will escalate on that front.
The simplest solution, in all cases, is to accept only messages (whether IMs, slash postings, or emails) from known people. But email has a strong tradition of anonymity, and a valuable one. ACs in Slashdot can be anonymous informants inside a company. Or, far more likely, they're assholes. It's hard to tell without reading.
A friend of mine strongly believes that if it's worth saying, it's worth sticking your name on, and your neck out. She's never lived in China, or Afghanistan, so I can't say if she's right in the general case. But most of the time, she's right, and people afraid to communicate publicly are far more likely to be assholes than hidden geniuses.
Spammers can establish a short-term identity, but such identities can be, uh, identified. When receiving a message from, say, yahoo.com, ask the server how long this person has had the account, and whether its past behavior is spam-like. Does it receive emails? Does it reply to them?
Obviously it's not fully worked out, and even more importantly, it will take a long time for such things to filter through the entire Internet.
But I predict that in ten years, we'll have eliminated most forms of anonymity in email, and spam will be rejected at the server rather than filtered out. (I also predict that a lot of the burden of mass mail will be moved to RSS rather than email, but that's another story.)
Anonymity, sadly, will fall by the wayside. It'll still be there, but the anonymous informants will be ignored. It sucks to be inside the sort of tyrrany that make anonymity necessary, and I hate to pay the price of keeping them down, but I hope mechanisms will evolve (say, a chain of authentication) that will allow a form of anonymity without the downsides.
Meantime, get yourself a bunch of accounts, and give different accounts to different people, based on relationship and level of trust. In the future, your identity (and identities) will be one of the most valuable things you own.
Re:*sigh*.... (Score:2)
11 Billion? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:11 Billion? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:11 Billion? (Score:2)
They're the ones who supported snail-mail addresses in email and genuine (rather than fake) unsubscribe addresses (though they don't want to make it easy for you to filter it out based on them).
They're really the guys who send you junk snail mail. They have stuff to sell, and they hate the fraudsters because that makes it
Re:11 Billion? (Score:2)
I'm old... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I'm old... (join the club) (Score:2)
I remember when I first heard of the World Wide Web, back in '92. I thought "Why do you need a gui interface? Gopher and FTP work just fine."
As you can tell, I am no techo-revolutio
Re:I'm old... (Score:2, Interesting)
What really helped get the ball rolling was Kroll's book in the fall of '92 (Sep/Oct) Around Jan/Feb '93, it hit the computer best-selling lists (yes, there are separate lists for those things) and the major publishing houses scrambled to cat
Slashdot once again behind the times. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Slashdot once again behind the times. (Score:2, Informative)
The 23rd SPAM (Score:5, Funny)
(real name withheld by request)
The 23rd Spam
The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures,
He leadeth me beside the still waters,
He restoreth my credit and consolidateth my debts,
For as little as $1,750,
If I act now.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil: for thou art with me,
Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.
And can now be 50 Percent Larger in Three Weeks.
Guaranteed.
Thou preparest a table before me
In the presence of mine enemies,
Thou annointest my head with oil,
My cup runneth over.
But as an added bonus,
I will receive $1,000.00 cash,
If I complete thy online registration form today.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me,
All the days of my life,
And I will dwell forever,
In the House of the Lord,
Which I shall refinanceth,
To take advantage,
Of the lowest mortgage rates in years.
Celebration? (Score:5, Insightful)
here's a good mail filter (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:here's a good mail filter (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:here's a good mail filter (Score:2, Insightful)
$155?? (Score:5, Funny)
Crikey, thats a lot of penis enlargement pills.
I feel quite inadequate now.
And you know because....? (Score:2)
Is it? I wouldn't know.
Mail Enhancement Drugs (Score:2, Interesting)
Mourning Spam's Ten Year Anniversary
Ten Years of Spam Adversity
Ten Years of the most villainous scum (outside of Mos Eisley) crawling out of the woodwork
Ten Years of some putz trying to get $25,000,000 out of a bank account somewhere in the world
Ten Years of geeks valiantly slugging it out on the front lines of the conflict while Washington dithers
Ten Years abusing free speech in another vein
Ten Years watching a valuable resource be clogged by the low run
fidonet (Score:2)
It's True! Spam works. (Score:5, Informative)
While irritating as hell to many, the sad truth is that spam works. And I know this from first-hand experience (Don't you love AC's!?).
You know all those viagra ads you get? Well chances are it's not from us (I've never met someone who's gotten one of our spams), but maybe you have. In any case, we have margins 100% - 200% higher for people who buy via bulk mail than via other advertising methods, and sales are pretty darn good. I would imagine this isn't too surprising considering the kind of people who would actually respond to spam aren't that wise. In any case, as much as it is hated, it is effective. If it wasn't effective it wouldn't happen.
Re:Uh huh.... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not a spammer, but I'm a pretty good liar. You don't lie about things that are totally obvious, and that you have no reason to lie about. Such as saying that spammers spam because they make money that way.
We're aiming at the wrong people (Score:5, Insightful)
now go ahead and mod me flaimbait or troll you useless dickweeds!
Re:We're aiming at the wrong people (Score:2)
Re:We're aiming at the wrong people (Score:2)
Now are you saying you want to institute a "network liscense" or some other similarly named liscense to operate a computer on a public network? That would open up a whole nother "can of worms" so to speak.
Happy Birthday, Spam! (Score:5, Funny)
To: Spam
From: Everyone
[spam opens package] thousands of spring-loaded snakes carrying advertisements for penis enlargers, viagra, and various pointless gidgets flys out.
Bottom of package reads:
To be removed from this list, email: okstopspammingmeseriously@yeahrightlikethisisarea
Topic title (Score:2)
Oh, I remember it well (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the halcyon days of grad school, this...this...ad! shows up in a newsgroup I favored. I dashed off an e-mail them (several, in fact) including many full copies of their post. I encouraged my fellow students to do the same.
We were quite happy to learn later the flood of mail took down their server. Yes, there I was riding the crest of the spam fighting movement without even knowing it. And at the time it was just a break from Netrek and posting via anon.penet.fi...
This message has no point. Just some memories of an old guy. Did I ever tell you about programming the Commodore PETs in the math department in high school? It was like this...
A Grain of Salt... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or how about a ton of salt.
What's that? The *Direct Marketing Association* released a report saying that spam sales accounted for $11.7 billion?
But wait, isn't the DMA the very organization that represents the interests of the spam houses?
Gee, I wonder if they would have an interest in convincing people [particularly retailers] that spam is a successful form of advertising?
And what's that you say? The $11.7 billion estimate is based on calls to 1000 consumers? I wonder how they decided which 1000 people to call? I'll give you a hint...I bet they didn't opt in.
Re:A Grain of Salt... (Score:2)
Wasn't this the year (Score:3, Interesting)
To much admin time on email before spam (Score:4, Interesting)
Since SPAM has propogated on to email, I am reminded of my favorite lines out of the Unix Haters Handbook [mit.edu].
The interesting thing is that all this was published before the C&S Usenet spamming. How much time are admins spending on email management now?
SPAM has killed Usenet's usefullness for me. At least filters like Popfile [sourceforge.net] and such are keeping SPAM over email bearable; even if they are not fixing the problem.
To the moon ! (Score:3, Funny)
If one person answered all of these penis lengthening ads and purchased the product, the resulting member would stretch to the moon, circle it 3 times, and reach all the way back.
Re:To the moon ! (Score:2)
Bringing Down AOL (Score:4, Informative)
This is older than 10 years, but Tim Bray [tbray.org] tells a funny story about how he might have brought down AOL back in 1988 in response to getting a spam email from someone with the email address lipstick@aol.com.
He launched a job to send an angry response email every 10 seconds. He forgot about it until he heard a couple of guys talking a few days later about how their aol accounts were down over the weekend.
Check it out [tbray.org], it's pretty hilarious.
How many times? (Score:3, Interesting)
Refunds? (Score:2)
Oh Man! (Score:4, Funny)
The only solution to spam (Score:4, Insightful)
So how hard can it be to find exactly the companies that sold this stuff?
These are ultimately the companies that are responsible for spam. Why don't we hold them liable? I think I can proof that spam is costing me a significant amount of money (mostly lost time) even though I do have a fairly good working filter.
I hear all the time that we can't really get the spammers because they are in China, or recently because they use zombies/compromised boxes all over the internet. Well, at the end of the day, it's not the spamhouses that are responsible for this. If no-one paid them to spam, it wouldn't be a business.
So someone is paying money to get this spam to you. How come we can't go after them and make them pay?!
when it's 20 (Score:2, Funny)
spamming for fun and profit (Score:3, Funny)
Oh man, the dark side is calling me. It's whispering in the back of my mind "Go ahead and just send out millions of emails a day and rake in millions of dollars. So what if you are hated by almost every living person on the planet....11.7 billion!"
Then I smack myself and remember the most important lesson my dad ever taught me "never degrade yourself for money, only for personal enjoyment".
They are never going to be able to stop these guys now. With that kind of money they can buy all the influence they need to keep pumping this crap out until the system becomes so overloaded that people stop using email altogether.
revenues (Score:5, Insightful)
Strange and unbelievable (Score:3, Insightful)
From a survey of 1000 respondants... $32.5 billion on solicited and unsolicited combined.
What's the U.S. population these days?
250,000,000?
$130 for every man, woman and child in the U.S.?
How much per household with a computer and an internet connection?
By email?
Based on a survey?
Of people who responded?
Of people who knew what email was?
Of people who knew what it meant to respond to an email?
Of people who knew the difference between a solicited and an unsolicited email?
Sponsored by the Direct Marketing Association?
I call BS.
Further... some stats (Score:2)
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0902841.html [infoplease.com]
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005055.html [infoplease.com]
Projecting 2004 to have 70% of all households with Internet connectivity (doubtful), there are about 70 million Internet connected households in the U.S... let's assume 100% of them read their email (I barely read my email with all the SPAM in it)
I don't know anyone who purchased anything via bulk email... or bulk mail for that matter (except taxis, and ordering fast food...), but it seems that the average person w
Happy spam anniversaries (Score:5, Informative)
1978: The first internet E-mail spam, sent by DEC (Score:5, Informative)
People in Hawaii are collecting spam (Score:2, Funny)
I know, I know. Offtopic. Lighten up though, it's SPAM!!
damn lies and statistics: 11.7b in spam sales? No (Score:4, Interesting)
And if you believe that number I have a new marketing technique for you called 'Silent Marketing'. Just pay me a few thousand dollars and your product will be available to millions of potential buyers! Billions of dollars were spent over the web this year, so obviously my marketing idea will generate billions of dollars for you! Never mind what the idea is, other people are making money so if you give me money, you'll be making money too!
This was the SECOND. (Score:5, Informative)
This report is mistaken. The first large-scale spamming of Usenet preceeded this one by nearly two months. I remember it well, as I used Usenet pretty heavily at the time.
It wasn't lawyers hawking green cards who really got the ball rolling. It was a religious nut warning us all about the end of the world. On January 17, 1994, Clarence L. Thomas IV (not the Supreme Court guy) spammed all known Usenet groups with a message titled Global Alert For All: Jesus is Coming Soon .
You can see the original message in Google's archives [google.com]. And you can read about some of the after-effects in RISKS 15.49 [ncl.ac.uk], from February 1994.
Canter & Siegel, the green card spammers, certainly earned their awful reputation. But they were only ripping off someone else's idea.
Re:This was the SECOND. (Score:2)
Spam... sorry, "mass advertising" (Score:2, Funny)
I'd like to see the weighted mean (Score:2)
I'd be willing to guess that they included all the scams (such as those of Nigerian type) into those figures, and the actual reality is quite different than reported.
Not only that, but what about the 'average made per impression'? Seems pretty ineffective. Seems like you'd piss people off more than anything.
Of course, there's nothing like an
Celebrate ! (Score:4, Funny)
Lie, Damned Lies, and ... (Score:3, Insightful)
The average buy was $155, which exceeds the average of $114 that opt-in e-mail generated.
What matters is not the average amount spent per transaction, but the average amount spent per email.
Cruel and Unusual Punishment (Score:3, Interesting)
I say we go back to the days of stocks, pillories and public humiliation in an effort to stop spam. You get caught buying something via spam, you get hauled to the city square, shackeled to a post, and the rest of us get to throw rotten tomatoes at you. For example, buy Cialis and you get to spend your "special weekend" in the stocks.
This survey by the DMA... (Score:3, Insightful)
In other news... (Score:3, Funny)
In other news, the American Society for the Sales of Alternative Medicine estimated that new age hippies saved $47.3 trillion by forgoing medical insurance and waving crystals around insead.
Re:Data Dammit (Score:2)
Re:Yeah, right (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Seems like a good place to ask it... (Score:2)
Re:Um, no. (Score:2)