大象传媒

Spam, spam, lovely spam

• Darren Waters
• 31 Mar 08, 15:31 GMT

"Spam, lovely spam, wonderful spam," sang the group of Vikings in the famous Monty Python sketch of 1970.

Eight years later the first spam message was sent, while it took another 15 years before unsolicited bulk e-messages were given the popular moniker.

I've been speaking to the man who first coined the term in the sense we understand it today, . And you can see the first recorded use of "spamming" as a term .

Back in 1993 discussion boards were the popular method of communicating and sites became hit by "spammers" who flooded the boards with abusive postings.

A US man called Richard Depew which would strip out the abusive postings automatically, explained Joel.

"The thought was that if people were rude enough to post thousands of messages about crap they wouldn鈥檛 respond to polite 'don鈥檛 do that' messages," said Joel.

"But his program sort of broke and ironically it started posting thousands and thousand of its own messages and shut down many systems that were not designed to cope with that many messages.

鈥淲e were trying to reach him through the night to shut it all down - and eventually did so. In sober light of day I posted a summary describing it as "spamming" a discussion list.

"That was the first usage that was recorded. After that usage it did come to refer more directly to out of control messaging."

Until 1993 spam was not a real problem on discussion boards and e-mail spam was virtually non-existent because people's e-mail addresses were largely unknown.

"The world wide web sparked spam because people started to put their e-mail addresses on their site," said Joel.

He told me: "I would really like to see the problem be not so prevalent.

"We have this awesome tool to make it possible for people in any part of the planet to exchange ideas with one another and yet people are going out of their way to not use it because of the spammers, because of the jerks."

Spam is a blight on our digital lives But four years ago Bill Gates spam would soon be a thing of the past.

It's pretty evident that that prediction didn't come to pass - so why not?

"When Bill Gates announced that the solution at the time reflected the problem as it stood then. The problem is that spam has not stood still," Mark Sunner, chief analyst at Message Labs told me.

"All spam is unsolicited and the thinking at the time was that if you can prove the sender is who they say they are - called authentication - then you can avoid spam.

"At the time that statement was true - but true only if spammers had stood still. If spammers had done nothing else then that prediction would have been true."

One of the main issues since Gates spoke is that e-mail authentication technologies, like Domain Keys, have yet to be adopted widely enough to influence the flow of spam.

And so we continue to live with a torrent of spam - not just in our e-mail, but on blogs too.

And for the man who coined the term, how does spam affect him today?

"Bit by bit we're having to stop using discussion groups because they are flooded with spam.

"I have about 3,500 in my spam folder this morning."