Digby Warde-Aldam

Happy birthday, spam! Do you mind if we don’t celebrate?

Junk mail is 20 years old – and there’s more of it every day

[Getty Images] 
issue 24 May 2014

The other day, I got an email advertising ‘miracle’ weight loss. You know the sort: English as defined by Boggle and no way on earth that anyone would ever buy the product in question. I opened it without thinking, and was redirected to a blank page. Within minutes, my Hotmail, Twitter and WordPress accounts had gone haywire; I stared at my computer screen as the original message replicated itself and fired off to every single one of my contacts. My groan lasted about 20 minutes: why, I asked myself, would anyone bother doing this to me?

It turned out I’d been hacked on a convenient anniversary. In April 1994, two American lawyers called Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel sent out the first ever commercial spam message. It was an advert for their help registering for a ‘Green Card Lottery’ — a sort of lucky dip for US residency. The message, posted on a Usenet discussion forum, was read millions of times but cost only a tiny amount to send.

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