The Tyranny of E-mail by John Freeman

Author:John Freeman
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2009-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

Don’t Talk to a Stranger on the Internet

Spam is such a universal problem today that its dimensions are hard to properly comprehend. By some estimates, 85 to 95 percent of all e-mail sent is spam, and dealing with it cost $140 billion in 2008. It has been with us since the beginning of the Internet, too. Gary Thuerk sent the first piece of it in May 1978 over the ARPANET to 400 of the 2,600 people who had e-mail addresses at that time to invite them to an open house for new models of Digital Equipment Systems computers in Los Angeles. Like G. S. Smith’s band of circular mailers, Thuerk had to type every e-mail address in by hand. Many of the people who heard from him weren’t happy about being pitched. Someone from the RAND Corporation wrote to him to say he had broken an unwritten rule of the ARPANET that it wasn’t to be used for selling things. A major phoned Thuerk’s boss and asked that he never send such an e-mail again. Even so, it was a cost saver and a success. It also led to an estimated $12 million in sales.

The origin of the word “spam,” as identifying unwanted mass messaging, is in dispute. One of them links back to the Monty Python skit from the 1970s in which a man and a woman (played by Eric Idle and Terry Jones, in drag) are trying to order from a breakfast menu at a cafeteria in which every item has Spam in it. Spam—the canned pink pork product— was one of the only meats not subject to rationing in post–World War II Britain, so it was ubiquitous, some would say unfortunately so. Whenever the word “Spam” is uttered in the skit—and it is said 132 times in three minutes—a chorus of Vikings chimes in.

As in postwar Britain, people didn’t want any spam, but they would get it nonetheless. Aside from Gary Thuerk’s message, other examples of early mass messaging included one sent on an early time-sharing network mail program at MIT to the more than one thousand users linked to it protesting the Vietnam War. The message began: THERE IS NO WAY TO PEACE. PEACE IS THE WAY. In the early days of the Internet, “spamming” referred to the habit of flooding chat rooms and bulletin boards with unwanted text. Around this time the immigration lawyers Laurence A. Canter and Martha S. Siegel paid a Phoenix programmer to flood Usenet’s various message boards with an advertisement for their service of enrolling people in the green card lottery. As with Thuerk’s e-mail, the outcry was immediate. But it didn’t matter; the scheme worked. In just two months the ad brought the couple $100,000 of new business.

As more and more people began using e-mail, spammers gravitated to it as the best way to target potential customers. By 2005, there were 30 billion spam messages per day; in 2007 that number had jumped to 100 billion. The number of these

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.