The internet started as a military and educational project, it was never intended to be used to make money, which means there was no reason to send commercial (spam) mail. There was no such thing as spam, just emails of a non-commercial nature.

The story behind the term ‘Spam’ revolves around the comedic sketch of a British comedy act called Monty Python. In this particular sketch, a man and his wife are in a restaurant trying to place an order, but everything they ordered was spammed, and while they are trying to get an order that was not spammed, there are vikings singing in the background; “Spam spam spam spam. Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!” This Monty Python episode existed when the internet was simply a few computers connected to each other via a telephone cord.

The first spam email is believed to have been written when the internet was called the ‘Arpanet’. It came from an employee of Digital Equipment Corporation. The email was meant to be sent to everyone on the Arpanet; however, some names were cut because space was limited.

The exact term for spam is Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE), although you’ll see the term Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE) used more often.

The multi-level marketing crowd and the traffickers of pornography; these are the scammers that spam is most popular with because it costs them so little to send it. This is because they send it stealing the resources of others.

In 1986, a man named Dave Rhodes became one of the first people to send what is now considered a terrible form of spam messages. Dave Rhodes was a supposed college student, however there is no record of Dave Rhodes having attended the college he said he attended or actually existed. The email that he allegedly sent advertised a pyramid scheme. This message was posted to a newsgroup called Usenet. Sadly, many people probably handed over their hard-earned money to Dave Rhodes only to get nothing in return.

In 1993, a man named Richard Depew wrote a program that would remove posts from newsgroups; ironically, this program had a bug and ended up posting 200 messages to the news management policy newsgroup. This is the first instance of messages being called ‘spam’.

In 1994, two men known as Cantor and Siegel became two of the most hated users on the Internet after posting an ad to 6,000 newsgroups at the same time.

Today spam is worse than ever with over 90 million spam emails being sent every day. Microsoft creator Bill Gates is also estimated to receive four million emails a year, with spam making up the vast majority.

More than 85% of emails are spam and this number shows no sign of abating.