Internet once blissfully free of spam
By Charles Miller May 9, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

Regular readers of this column know I am a student of history and from time to time will note the passing of notable anniversaries. This week marks another important one.

In the sixties and seventies, a network of university, government and military computers known as Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was in the beginning an experiment in communications and information sharing. After a decade, several thousand people were connected to ARPANET, most of them computer scientists and people involved in the electronics industry.

One of the individuals on ARPANET was an executive of Digital Equipment Corporation named Gary Thuerk (pronounced Turk). Like all ARPANET users, he explored the capabilities of the new electronic world. “I was the pioneer,” he says today, “I saw a new way of doing things.”

Thuerk wanted to invite a few hundred Southern California users of ARPANET to an open house in Los Angeles to see the latest computer model on display. ARPANET made it possible to send those invitations via email, but it was a tedious job of typing in each address individually using unsophisticated software.

Thuerk realized it was too much work to send everyone an email and decided to find a way to send one email to all six hundred people on his list…a small percentage of the thousands of users then on ARPANET.

On May 3, 1978, Thuerk sent out the first-ever spam email.

Since ARPANET was built and maintained by the government, it was not intended to be used for commercial purposes. It was a system for communication among colleagues who were not supposed to pester you with advertising. Thuerk’s spam was a clear and flagrant abuse. He was reprimanded by the ARPANET administrators and told not to do it again. Indeed it appears that he heeded the warning and did not send out any more unsolicited emails. Unfortunately, though, his spam worked and the genie was about to be out of the bottle.

The new computer Thuerk was advertising cost a million dollars a pop and over the next three years, Digital Equipment sold more than 20 of them. Thuerk and his spam email received a lot of credit for those sales and the lesson was not forgotten.

The first-ever spam email sent by Gary Thuerk was a key moment in the history of the internet, although this went unheralded for many years. For the next decade as ARPANET developed into the internet it remained blissfully free of spam.

The stern reprimand given to Thuerk had put a stop to spam for years, but the online community had made a mistake in believing the problem was over.

As we observe the 30th anniversary of the invention of spam email, the online community is facing an email crisis. The sheer volume of unsolicited bulk email is today threatening to overcome the system.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) big and small are straining under the weight of billions of spam, having to add new servers to carry the load. The discouraging truth is that over 90 percent of email traffic is now spam.

Even though the ISPs trap much of this spam in filters before it ever gets through, enough still makes it into user’s inboxes to annoy, distress and outrage.

For a look at how we got to where we are now, there is a bit more history to explore and I will continue with that story next week.

Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981 and now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at 044-415-101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.