Spam, a little history

Spam. It’s Hormel’s SPicey hAM product popularized after being distributed to every American soldier in WWII but became the moniker of unsolicited emails after a Monty Python skit in 1970 in which diners, trying to order something from the menu that has no Spam, is overpowered by a group of Vikings in the background chanting Spam! Spam! Spam! As the short order cook tells them to shut up. See this video on You Tube.

In 1994, a couple lawyers started the spam craze when they made $100,000 on 1000 clients by sending a mass email to millions offering services to help get immigrants into the country. Their internet service providers (back then there were a lot of individual ISPs, I remember) disowned them - cancelled their accounts. The community was so incensed by the inappropriate use of the web, a techno-faux pas. They proceeded to write a book about it.

What’s a botnet? In 2003, the Sobig virus was sent out, designed to embed code into machines that enabled it to send millions of emails (turning it into a pseudo network). The infected PCs called zombies or slaves linked together in a sort of network (botnet) controlled by folk somewhere in the world.

So, easy-to-guess passwords on your wireless network can make you vulnerable to getting spam-making viruses or virus-sending spam. Cruising the net and clicking on infected websites can trigger a “drive-by download” of a virus to your computer, then find address books and send itself to all your contacts!

2003 was the year they passed the CAN-SPAM act –Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing. The bill permits e-mail marketers to send unsolicited commercial e-mail as long as it adheres to 3 basic types of compliance: unsubscribe, content and sending behavior. In May 2008, two spammers were convicted and sentenced to pay $234M to MySpace in damages under the CAN-SPAM act.

Did you know that in 2007 (I read about this in the August 2007 New Yorker magazine article by Michael Specter) Microsoft Hotmail had 285M accounts which were all filtered for Spam (in this case I should call it spam, no capital S) plus 130,000 special email accounts designed to trap and examine suspicious email? some designed to function as “honeypots” that receive emails and determine the source’s internet address after the sender thinks they have successfully infected it…

Billions of dollars a year are spent to filter/examine spam. USA today (Dec 2009) says spam accounts for 88% of all e-mails. Image spam was the latest thing… computers have an easier time filtering for text than for images, because computers can’t see, and images have a lot more data to look through…

Ok this blog entry is long enough.