The History of Email Spam: How the Internet’s Most Hated Idea Refused to Die
The First Unwanted Message
Long before pop-ups, phishing scams, or filters, there was Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager at Digital Equipment Corporation who made history with a single keystroke. On May 3, 1978, Thuerk sent an unsolicited promotional email to 393 people on ARPANET, the research network that would become the Internet. His message invited recipients to a demonstration of DEC’s new computer systems. It was the first time anyone had used a network to advertise.
The reaction was swift. Researchers accused him of violating the spirit of the network, which at the time was meant for collaboration and research, not commerce. Administrators banned mass messages. Thuerk was reprimanded by his managers. Yet the campaign worked. He sold thirteen computers, generating millions in new business.
From that moment, the Internet carried a contradiction that never went away. Spam was both detested and profitable. It was a problem that rewarded its own persistence.
1994: The Day Spam Broke the Internet
For the next fifteen years, spam lived quietly in the margins of the digital world. It appeared on mailing lists and obscure message boards, but it had not yet defined the online experience. That changed in April 1994, when two Arizona lawyers, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, sent what would later be called the Green Card Spam. Their message offered immigration services to thousands of Usenet groups at once.
Usenet was a vast collection of discussion boards that formed the social layer of the early Internet. Each group centered on a specific topic, from astronomy to programming. Until then, people treated it as a shared community space, governed by etiquette and mutual respect. Canter and Siegel ignored all of that. They hired a programmer to write a Perl script that automatically posted their ad to more than five thousand groups, each as a unique message that bypassed duplicate filters.
Within hours, the Internet erupted. The same headline appeared everywhere. Servers slowed, administrators panicked, and the couple’s provider terminated their account. Yet Canter and Siegel saw opportunity. They claimed the campaign brought thousands of new clients. Within months, they had founded a company called Cybersell to sell online marketing services.
For many, their message was vandalism. For others, it was prophecy. The Green Card Spam revealed the tension at the Internet’s core: the same technology that connected people could also be used to exploit them.
The 2000s: The Golden Age of Garbage
By the early 2000s, the Internet had outgrown its academic roots. The dot-com boom had turned the web into a marketplace, and email had become essential to daily life. Spam was no longer a fringe annoyance, it was an empire.
Inboxes filled with fake Rolexes, miracle cures, and lottery winnings from imaginary princes. By 2004, more than eighty percent of all global email traffic was spam. Entire industries formed around stopping it. Companies built firewalls and filters, and the U.S. passed the CAN-SPAM Act in 2003, the first federal attempt to regulate commercial email. The name was unintentionally accurate. The law did not eliminate spam; it legalized it under certain conditions. Clever marketers learned to comply just enough to stay in business.
Then came Gmail. When Google launched its email service in 2004, it offered one gigabyte of storage, lightning-fast search, and a spam filter that changed everything. Instead of blocking fixed keywords, it learned from behavior. It watched what users opened, ignored, or marked as junk, and then adjusted its filters accordingly. For the first time, it felt possible to manage the chaos.
Gmail’s algorithmic filter was more than a technical fix. It marked the beginning of a new era, one where software decided what humans were allowed to see. For a moment, it felt as if the Internet might finally be reclaiming order.
The Legacy of the Unsolicited
Spam didn’t destroy the Internet, it exposed it. It revealed that every open system is vulnerable to exploitation, and that every attempt to filter noise eventually creates new kinds of it. Spam became the Internet’s mirror, showing us our appetite for reach, relevance, and recognition.
The first spammer sent 393 messages. Today, the world sends more than 347 billion emails every day, and over half are unwanted. The scale changed, but the instinct did not. Spam endures because the Internet rewards it.
Spam is not the disease; it’s the symptom. Wherever attention exists, someone will find a way to monetize it.
