Anti Spam - SpamUnit

As long as there has been email, there has been spam. Indeed, the first recorded incident of spam was in 1978, long before the World Wide Web, when an unsuspecting net user launched the concept of spam with an unsolicited email - albeit a non-commercial one - to 600 addreses. But the term “spam” itself to relate to commercial, unsolicited email didn’t come from email, but from USENET (newsgroups), which were and indeed remain extremely popular - not to mention an easy way for spammers to harvest email addresses.

It was the victims, not the senders, who called it spam. Online text-based games, such as MUDs (Multi-user Dungeons) seemed to produce the word spam to signify anything unwanted, repetitive and unsolicited - a screen full of random or annoying text, for example. When USENET became the victim of such attacks, the term left the game and gained a wider meaning. Spam was soon to become an inevitable reality of internet life.

In 1994, the first massive, deliberate spamming took place. However, the spammer wasn’t trying to sell anything: he was trying to save souls with a spam called “Global Alert for All: Jesus is Coming Soon”, posted to every USENET Group. Then, inevitably, the first real commercial spam followed, advertising the US Green Card. Clearly, the spammers thought there was money in this venture; they soon published a book detailing how and why to spam. (Justice was served when the book sold poorly.) Thus, spamming as an industry, not just as an annoyance, was born.

It was certain that email and commercial spam would collide; when they did, this started the spam industry as we know it today. By 1994, this was a major problem; anyone whose email address was publically available - such as by posting to USENET - would become a spam victim. Whether it was traditional, snail-mail junk items (like Make Money Fast, a famous get-rich-quick scheme) that made the transition to the internet, or brand new companies trying to get a piece of the action online, by the mid 1990s, literally millions of people were affected by spam.

And it only got worse. Spammers became more bold and more intelligent, figuring out ways to evade spam filters by using images instead of text, or lines of gibberish instead of easily-recognisable keywords. Most developed nations - and several developing nations - passed laws to restrict or outright ban spamming. But still the spam came. Despite years of fighting, by 2005, the number of spam emails sent numbered in the billions - each day. 30 billion spam messages per day sailed through the internet, at great cost to the infrastructure of the network and to certain ISPs.

Quickly, spamming travelled the world. In a far cry from the early days of 600 spams sent to West Coast addresses in the United States, spam had truly become a global language; China, South Korea and Russia became massive spamming hotspots, either hosting the IPs sending out the emails or hosting the product websites themselves. China rapidly became a global leader in hosting spam sites as the laws in other countries caught up to the spammers.

Where the law failed, ISPs had already tried to step in. Most ISPs banned spamming entirely from the mid 90s onwards, but spammers are often at the forefront of technology and can evade capture through masking techniques and simply moving ISP quickly. Indeed, some ISPs found spammers to be profitable clients and happily accepted them. Thankfully, these ISPs are in the minority, so in most cases the spammers’ business became tougher due to laws and terms of service in their countries and with their ISPs.

But in such a profitable business, nobody would go down without a fight. As ISPs and laws advanced, so too did spamming techniques. By 2003, spam virus software had been developed. These spam virii essentially hijacked computers - at homes and businesses worldwide - to turn them into automated spammers. The “spamware” worked by taking over an email program and internet connection to send hundreds of emails to all available addresses without the user’s permission, or even their knowledge. Operating system manufacturers such as Microsoft were quick to patch in security to stop this, but for those not tech-savvy enough to upgrade, it could be a real problem.

And it wasn’t just email. Instant messaging programs like MSN and AIM had spam problems of their own, usually making use of automated software and sometimes virii, too. Online games soon followed; indeed, wherever people congregate online, there is spam.

Offline, the biggest changes in spam have come through the courts. The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 essentially legalised spam in the United States, but stipulated many restrictions on the sending and usage of spam emails. Further, some spammers who’ve fallen foul of the law have been fined heavily or even jailed, the first incarceration coming in 2004 with a notorious spammer getting a nine-year sentence.

Spammers in the US and some other countries, spooked by the possibility of jail time and hefty fines, continue to spam, but do so within the law. However, in a globalised, largely anonymous business, plenty of unscrupulous spammers still operate worldwide. How to deal with the rising problem of spam is a defining issue in our digital age.