Throwback Thursday: The First Spam

In early 1994, Canter and Siegel contracted with Leigh Benson to write a program to advertise on Usenet, but Benson was unable to write their software. In April 1994 they used a Perl script written by a programmer known only as “Jason”, to generate advertisements for their service of enrolling people in a “green card lottery”. This US government program allocates a limited quantity of “green cards” to certain non-citizens, allowing them to stay and work in the country. The two lawyers offered to do the necessary paperwork for a fee.[1]

Canter and Siegel sent their advertisement, with the subject “Green Card Lottery – Final One?”, to at least 5,500 Usenet discussion groups, an enormous number at the time.[2] Rather than cross-posting a single copy of the message to multiple groups, so a reader would only see it once (considered a common courtesy when posting the same message to more than one group), they posted it as separate postings in each newsgroup, so a reader would see it in each group they read. Their internet service provider, Internet Direct, received so many complaints that its mail servers crashed repeatedly for the next two days; it promptly terminated their service.[2] Despite the ire directed at the two lawyers, they posted another advertisement to 1,000 newsgroups in June 1994.[3] This time, Arnt Gulbrandsen put together a software “cancelbot” to trawl Usenet and kill their messages within minutes.[4] Canter claimed in a December 1994 interview regarding the spam that “The best I can recall we probably made somewhere between $100,000 to $200,000 related to that”.[5]

Source: Wikipedia

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *