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Communications Network Spam

Forty Years of Spam Email (bbc.com) 95

Posted by BeauHD from the this-day-in-history dept.
An anonymous reader writes: The BBC has a video celebrating the 40th birthday of spam email. Here's a transcript of the video: "It is 40 years since the first spam email was sent. Marketer Gary Thuerk composed an email selling his company's newest computers and sent it to 400 users on ARPANET, which was the network that become the basis for the internet. Why is it called spam? It has been suggested that it was called spam after a song in a Monty Python sketch. Where patrons of a cafe were repeatedly offered something they didn't want. The concept of spam is nothing new. Unsolicited telegrams were sent over 100 years ago and we've come to accept junk mail as part of everyday life. Now [nearly 60%] of all email is spam. Like most rubbish, it can be found everywhere on earth."
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Forty Years of Spam Email More

Forty Years of Spam Email

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  • In the another 40 years the problem will be astronomically worse. In fact if all we do is keep trying to filter out spam, the problem will almost certainly be unbeatable within another decade. The spammers know that they are slowly winning the war against the filters as the signal:noise ratio keeps coming down ever so slightly as they get a little more spam through with each iteration. They know that the complement to this is that more legitimate communication ends up getting automatically junked by the same filters, which means that eventually the filters stop being useful.

    The only way to end this problem going forward is to finally look at spam for what it is. Spam is an economic problem. Spammers don't send you spam to make you mad or to waste your time. Spammers send you spam to make money, plain and simple. The only way to end it is to stop them from making money on it. You can't legislate it away by throwing arbitrary penalties at spammers - we've even heard of spammers being murdered on the street and it didn't stop more spammers from coming up to take their place. The only way to stop spam is to stop them from getting paid.

    This has been shown effective before. We need to track down how they are getting paid - it most often is based on click-throughs so we need to find who owns the spamvertised domain - and interfere with it. If the money doesn't get to the spammer, they no longer have a reason to send spam.

    Everything else is a waste of time, money, storage, more money, and more time.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:If all you do about it is filter ... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by i.r.id10t ( 595143 ) on Thursday May 03, 2018 @11:37PM (#56551756)

        And since I run my own domain, I can give each company their own address. This way I know who sells off that bit of info (or got hacked) and if I try to unsubscribe and it isn't honored I can kill off that address.

        • Careful what you wish for (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          The big companies listened to your distaste for being offered products you do not need.
          Solution:
          find out what you do need by invading privacy tracking and spying

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Running your own domain isn't even needed, just register a few free mail addresses with different freemail providers. That way you also get to learn what freemail providers sell your address to which spammers.

      • Check your spam folder in gmail and see what's in there. If you just signed up recently there isn't much but it won't take long. Eventually you'll need to check it regularly to find out what you're missing that you actually want to read. Filters are only making the situation worse and that's all they can do from this point forward.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by AvitarX ( 172628 )

          I miss a real email about once a year from SPAM filters in Gmail, and it's usually a shady email (as I contact form from a small website I setup, and didn't whitelist the address).

          Every now and again a registration confirmation or receipt goes there, but I know to check because I'm expecting it.

          I literally never check my Gmail SPAM just because.

          Even so, it's not too bad, I assume the vast majority of true spam doesn't even hit that folder.

          • I miss a real email about once a year from SPAM filters in Gmail, and it's usually a shady email. I literally never check my Gmail SPAM just because.

            Seriously?

            Let's take Linus, he somehow still uses Gmail. I'm too small a fry to send him pull requests, but I did make an April first [marc.info] one. (The mail archive web display mangles UTF-8 but it's correct in the actual mail, pretty vital for this actual patch set.). See Linus' complaint [marc.info]. Here we have correspondence from someone who had just participated in a two-way thread with Linus (something about modversions), the mail is GPG signed [xkcd.com] by a key one indirect node away, the mail being a well-formed pull reque

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by jon3k ( 691256 )

              Thus, Gmail is so bad in the false positive department that I don't think it's usable. Even worse, when it discards a mail this way, it doesn't notify the sender the way any sane server is supposed to!

              I've been using gmail since beta, I don't think I've ever had a false positive. Just thought I'd add another anecdotal datapoint.

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by AvitarX ( 172628 )

              Maybe a filter for [git pull] would solve that?

              It's formatted as a list message, the whole point of the square bracket list title is for the sake of mail filters.

        • I use rspamd, which simply rejects very spammy looking emails, greylists ones that are quite spammy, and sticks borderline ones in my spam folder. I get an average of about 5 emails in my spam filter each day. It's well under the threshold where I can easily check it every day (though I typically check it every few days).

          I don't think that the filters are making things worse: looking in my logs, I'm rejecting quite a lot of spam that appears to be from botnets. One of my colleagues studies spam and ha

      • fun fact, not everyone uses Google to manage their email
        Give that roughly 50% of emails is spam (Sept 2017 [statista.com]), I hardly say "problem long solved"
      • mostly stopped using my gmail account now, it is 90% spam content. Only check it occasionally now to point the people that still mail me their to my new address.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        The problem isn't spam in gmail, it's false positives, which I get weekly. So I have to check the spam folder anyway, frequently, just to make sure I am not missing anything.

    • Re:If all you do about it is filter ... (Score:4, Funny)

      by another_twilight ( 585366 ) on Friday May 04, 2018 @12:14AM (#56551866)

      we've even heard of spammers being murdered on the street and it didn't stop more spammers from coming up to take their place

      I'm not sure that this solution has been properly and thoroughly tested, and I don't think, in good conscience and out of respect for the scientific principle that we can dismiss it so casually until we have more evidence.

      Personally I'm a fan of a Lex Talionis type solution, where for every piece of Spam (unsolicted commercial email) sent, the sender must recieve (eat) one 'piece' of Spam (spiced ham). In one sitting. I'm happy for piece to be set at 1g. Small time offenders should survive that. And be suitable chastened.

      • Personally I'm a fan of a Lex Talionis type solution, where for every piece of Spam (unsolicted commercial email) sent, the sender must recieve (eat) one 'piece' of Spam (spiced ham). In one sitting. I'm happy for piece to be set at 1g. Small time offenders should survive that. And be suitable chastened.

        No. One bite per spam, which means at least 2.5g [quora.com].

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Tracking the money comes up every year at the MIT spam conference, or used to. It doesn't work. The cost of prosecution is so high, the international abuse from outlaw countries like Nigeria and Estonia are so high, and the "legitimate" spam vendors are such a part of modern business and advertising that laws will not be passed and vendors lobby to protect their spam business. Even the EFF got corrupted and sold out, when Jerry Berman took over the EFF and sold their soul to sign off on the CANSPAM act.

      Actu

    • Email needs to become 'opt in' (like your social media mail and instant messenger accounts). Then all you'll see is 'connection requests' from a Nigerian Prince, and not the actual spam. If you connect, then sure you'll get the spam otherwise you won't. The 'value' to Prince Mohammed of scatter-gunning connection requests around the world is going to be a lot less than sending actual content "just in case someone clicks on it". It'll still happen of course, but I suspect a lot less than you get spam emails

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MobyDisk ( 75490 )

      The economic problem is actually worse than you stated: Spammers send spam email even if they don't make money off of it. Let us divide spam into two kinds: advertising, and malware.

      Advertisers never knew how effective their ads were. (The web was supposed to fix that by giving them tons of analytics, but it never really worked out the way they hoped.) So even if spam advertising is economically negative for them, they have no way to know that and they send it anyway. So penalizing them economically wou

      • So even if spam advertising is economically negative for them, they have no way to know that and they send it anyway.

        This is one of two pillars of my "spam will never end" philosophy. The other, related issue, is that one person can be responsible for millions of pieces of spam. Even if it doesn't work, and even if the person responsible figures that out, it's entirely possible that someone else sees that spam and thinks "Hey, they wouldn't be doing it if it didn't work!"

        And so it goes on and on. As long as a spammer has customers paying them to spam, they're going to spam. Whether or not the customers are repeat ones doe

  • I really hate those unsolicited telegrams. I don't want or need any of your dag blum miracle liniment, consarn it!

  • I wonder what the impact of spam has been to Spam (The trademarked processed meat product). Would the company still be in business if its name wasn't mentioned millions of times a day because of something completely unrelated?

    • Apparently, Spam is really popular in Hawaii [wikipedia.org].

      I think it's one of those products like fruitcake, which everyone claims to hate, but obviously some people actually like it because it's still around. So, I think plenty of people eat it, but perhaps don't talk about it. Or more to the point, probably not so much in circles techies run in, which are perhaps more of an "avocado toast" crowd.

      Statistics from the 1990s say that 3.8 cans of Spam are consumed every second in the United States, totaling nearly 122 million cans annually. It became part of the diet of almost 30% of American households, perceived differently in various regions of the country. It is also sometimes associated with economic hardship because of its relatively low cost.

      Generally speaking, I think Spam would have done fine, even without the e-mail-related moniker.

      • I was just about to post a comment about the meat Spam, rather than spam mail. A friend of mine first got on the internet in the early 90's... what's the first thing he searched and looked up a website for? Spam. The "delicious meat."
      • IMO it's just a matter of cooking it right. Eating it raw is a bad idea but on the flip side spam musubi tastes really good.

      • 122 million cans is a lot... but not really when you consider there are what, about 370million people in the US (not sure if that number is still accurate but I'll use it).

        So one can per 3 people a year. 12oz in a can. So the average person consumes 4oz of spam a year. Or one third of an ounce a month. That's a really small amount- and it's probably offset by Hawaii where it is consumed at a higher rate, and by certain poor communities.

        It's probably also purchased as a gag on a semi-regular basis. Ever

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by barakn ( 641218 )

        Spam musubi is basically sushi with spam. It's delicious.

      • The problem with your analogy to fruitcake is that there's a spectrum between "slow smoked ham" and "processed pig meat in a can", and there's likewise a spectrum between "moist gingerbread with homemade dried fruit reconstituted with rum" and "dense, dry cake with nasty bitter candied fruit rinds in it".

        My mom makes an absolutely unbelievable fruitcake. Unfortunately, the cultural perception of fruitcake is more akin to spam than a nice smoked ham.

    • IIRC, back in the '90s, Hormel Foods (the company that made Spam) tried to sue a few websites that referred to junk mail as Spam or used Spam in such a context. Presumably, they were worried that this would give their product/brand a negative association. Unfortunately, like many of their contemporaries, they did not quite 'get' Internet-Culture. Perhaps this explains why many e-mail programs now refer to it as "Junk-Mail" instead of "Spam". I'm wondering if anyone did a study to see if Spam's association w

  • Marketer Gary Thuerk composed an email selling his company's newest computers and sent it to 400 users on ARPANET

    Marketers, just like Lawyers, giant radioactive lizards, and Old Ones, are best left deep in the ocean, unless you really need them.

  • Green card lottery spam (Score:4, Informative)

    by Michael Woodhams ( 112247 ) on Friday May 04, 2018 @01:29AM (#56552058) Journal

    I am not one of the privileged few who was on ARPANET in 1978: I was at high school and in the wrong country.

    I was, however, present for a somewhat later milestone in spam history: the green card lottery spam. On 12 April 2994, a pair of exceptionally unscrupulous lawyers spammed every newsgroup on Usenet with ads for (utterly unnecessary and very expensive) assistance in entering a lottery for USA green card (permanent residence.) This generated a great deal of internet hatred.

    https://www.wired.com/1999/04/... [wired.com]
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mccalli ( 323026 )
      They also spammed email too. However I'd never encountered spam at the time, and was wondering why everyone else seemed to be getting this and not me. Was I not good enough, was I not wanted...? Incredibly different times.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Me, too. Martha Siegel of Canter&Siegel wrote rude words about several of us from MIT for tracking them down and getting them kicked off of various ISP's for their abuse. They led to the change in user contracts that explicitly forbade spam.

      They were followed by the Scientologiests, who tried to "rmgroup" alt.religion.scientology to hide their cult secrets, then spammed it with messages from their critics, then eventually just took to flat-out spam. 3000 messages a night, 30 KBytes each to avoid NNTP fi

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      On 12 April 2994, a pair of exceptionally unscrupulous lawyers spammed every newsgroup on Usenet with ads for (utterly unnecessary and very expensive) assistance in entering a lottery for time travel .

      FTFY

    • In the Magic: the Gathering newsgroup, there was a lot of joking around, since Magic cards were generally black, white, red, blue, or green. It took a while for me to figure what had happened, since the spam message had been canceled by the time I logged in.

  • If some losers need to spam to make a dollar... scraping bottom of the barrel.

  • INCREASE YOUR TONER CARTRIDGE SIZE, NATURALLY! (Score:5, Funny)

    by guacamole ( 24270 ) on Friday May 04, 2018 @02:06AM (#56552170)

    This message is not spam.

    • If you do not wish to receive our emails, click this link and we will add you to our list of known, active email addresses and increase the rate of spam.

  • I feel that the real problem that allows spam to thrive is due to the horrible protocol that's used. Sure, with improvements like SPF, DKIM, and the like, it's a lot better, however I feel we need to move to a more modern protocol.

    Anything with a form of proof of work should cut down spam drastically. After users have confirmed legitimate mail from that MTA, allow an exception to be made, preventing the proof of work, or at least a more intensive version.

  • It's not the song that give it the name (Score:5, Informative)

    by Laxator2 ( 973549 ) on Friday May 04, 2018 @04:27AM (#56552516)

    It is the credits at the end.

    Just watch the credits roll and you see the word "Spam" inserted everywhere.
    Just like the junk messages littering you inbox, interspersed with the real messages.

    Written and spam performed by:

    Spam Terry Jones

    Michael Spam Palin

    John Spam John Spam
    John Spam Cleese

    Graham Spam Spam
    Spam Chapman

    etc..

  • 40 years of spam.. (Score:4, Funny)

    by thePsychologist ( 1062886 ) on Friday May 04, 2018 @04:54AM (#56552578) Journal

    ...and 40 years of users clicking on spam. When will they learn?

  • I thought the original SPAM was cross-posted News (NNTP) postings. Wasn't it only later applied to emails?

    I would appreciate the input of a neckbeard here.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Usenet was started in 1980. The first well known Usenet spam was posted in 1994 (the Green Card Lottery). The email referenced by the BBC was sent in 1978, well before the infamous first Usenet spam.

      • Re:Wasn't spam originally NNTP? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Antique Geekmeister ( 740220 ) on Friday May 04, 2018 @06:48AM (#56552830)

        The authors of the first Usenet spam were lawyers, disbarred in multiple states for fraud against their clients. They also tried to start a business selling spam services to others, which had a short profitable period until their level of fraud and abuse against their network providers and their own clients became clear.

        Some businesses engage in spam accidentally, because they are sold advertising services and don't understand the idea that "opt-in" email is accepted while "opt-out" is almost always unwanted, The vast majority, however, is abusive fraud. It remains a profound burden on every email system in the world, even those with good spam filtering, because there is a measurable cost of the filtering that generally far exceeds that for legitimate services.

  • In WWII Britain, Spam, which is essentially pig heads run through a grinder, was shipped by the ton to feed American troops. At war's end the Americans left but all the surplus Spam remained. As Britain recovered this lingering pink reminder of the American occupation showed up in markets and menus everywhere. The Monty Python skit was a play on that.

  • When my buddy insisted DKIM would eliminate SPAM and I just wasn't smart enough to understand why. I'd email him but his inbox is full again so...

    Hey Shawn! You're STILL WRONG!

  • This was the case at one company that I worked and ran their Postfix servers that handled the Internet traffic. It was pretty nuts...
  • https://it.slashdot.org/commen... [slashdot.org] - posted that 10 years ago...

    Nov 23, 1987 - 1st documented use of the word "spam" to describe unwanted electronic correspondence.

  • Ads are still a problem of the net. Yes, I said ads. Because what the fuck is spam other than that? Whether the junk litters your inbox or your browser real estate, what exactly is the difference?

    A spam filter and an ad filter are essentially doing the same, getting rid of unwanted junk nobody asked for.

  • It's not called spam because they kept being offered spam. It's called spam because they kept repeating the word spam.

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