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Origin of the term "spam" to mean net abuse
Much to the chagrin of
(See also my reflections on the 25th anniversary of spam.)
How did the term get this meaning? I went on a mission of etymological
research. In this article you'll learn how the term, born of canned ham,
moved into BBSs and MUDS and then was applied to USENET postings and E-mail.
I've put in a short history of the earliest big spams, including a special
page about the first E-mail spam from 1978.
(You'll be astounded to see which net celebrity defends the spam. But we
were all younger then.)
(This is an interesting time for spammiversaries. March 31st, 2003 marks the
10th anniversary of the term Spam being applied to a USENET post, and May 3rd
marks the 25th anniversary of the earliest documented E-mail spam.)
Plus at the bottom, a bit about the term surfing the net.
Most people have some vague awareness that it came from at first from
the
"Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, lovely spam! Wonderful spam!"
Until told to shut up.
Thus the meaning of the term at least: something that keeps repeating
and repeating to great annoyance. How did the two get connected?
In April of 1994, the term was not born, but it did jump a great deal in
popularity when two lawyers from Phoenix
named Canter and Siegel posted a message advertising their fairly useless
services in an upcoming U.S. "green card" lottery. This wasn't the first
such abusive posting, nor the first mass posting to be called a spam, but it
was the
first deliberate mass posting to commonly get that name. They had posted their
message a few times before, but on April 12, they hired an mercenary
programmer to write a simple script to post their ad to every single newsgroup
(message board) on USENET, the world's largest online conferencing system.
There were several thousand such newsgroups, and each one got the ad.
Quickly people identified it as "spam" and the word caught on. Future multiple
postings soon got the appelation. Some people also applied it
to individual unwanted
ads that weren't posted again and again, though generally it was associated
with the massive flood of the same message. It turns out, however, that
the term had been in use for some time before the famous green card flood.
Later, some particularly nasty folks figured they could take mass e-mailing
software (which had been around for decades to handle mailing lists) and
use it to send junk e-mail to large audiences who hadn't asked for it.
The term quickly came to be used to describe these unwanted junk e-mails,
and indeed that is the most common use of the term today.
The "green card" spam didn't coin the term, and it wasn't even the first
"spam" -- though it was the first really large commercial one.
My research shows the term goes back to the late 1980s and the "MUD" community.
A
But most people used MUDs to chat, and to play around and impress one another
with objects they created. They were at first a highly evolved successor
for the chat room.
The term spamming got used to apply to a few different behaviours. One was
to flood the computer with too much data to crash it. Another was to
"spam the database" by having a program create a huge number of objects,
rather then creating them by hand. And the term was sometimes used to mean
simply
flooding a chat session with a bunch of text inserted by a program
(commonly called a "bot" today) or just by inserting a file instead of your
own real time typing output.
There are unconfirmed reports as well that the term migrated to MUDs from
early "chat" systems. Rich Frueh believes the term originated on Bitnet's
My research has not found BBSers or Relay chatters using the term in USENET
messages, so for now I conclude it was MUDders who brought the term to
USENET and email.
Here we see
After the MUDders used the term, it would from time to time it would be used
to describe a net abuse, but its use was fairly rare. People far more
commonly talked of the luncheon meat. It wasn't a bad term at the time,
and many people liked to use it in site names, userids, signatures etc.
Einar Stefferud, a longtime net hand, reports that DEC announced a new
DEC-20 machine in 1978 by sending
an invite to all ARPANET addresses on the west coast, using the ARPANET
directory, inviting people to receptions in California. They were
chastised for breaking the ARPANET appropriate use policy, and a notice
was sent out reminding others of the rule.
I have put up a page with the message and its reaction or you can see it directly in the
msggroup archives (if they come back online.) It may amuse some to see
a young Richard Stallman
as one of the defenders of the spam!
Compaq now owns DEC, so perhaps Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard's heirs are simply among
those who vowed never to do business with spammers? Of course in 1978 nobody
called this a spam.
Even earlier, non-network spam
Tom Van Vleck, co-author of the CTSS MAIL command, reports an even earlier
spam sent on MIT's Compatbile Time Sharing
System (CTSS) as far back as 1971. A sysadmin named Peter Bos used CTSS MAIL
to send everybody the anti-war message that:
"THERE IS NO WAY TO PEACE. PEACE IS THE WAY." He reports the spammer
defended it by saying, "but this is important." He was also
an authorized admin, so this one is somewhat harder to classify.
A great
And people were thinking about the problem even before it took place. In
1975,
Rob Noha, using the account JJ@cup.portal.com posted on May 24, 1988
to as many newsgroups as he could find a plea to
Thus the first USENET spam was, in a sense, a charity spam. Or perhaps
charity 'scam' is a better word.
JJ posted to many groups, but each post was crossposted to 4 or 5 newsgroups,
to reduce the total volume, but still annoy.
However, nobody ever used the term "spam" to refer to this posting until
1996. It did spark a lot of debate about the merits of having sites like
Portal, which sold accounts to anybody with a few dollars. This
somewhat elitist viewpoint got even more prevalent when AOL was poised to
join the fray.
For many years, the classic unwanted post on USENET was
the "Dave Rhodes" "MAKE MONEY FAST" post. This was a pretty standard
chain letter, but a lot of people started sending it to mailing lists
and posting it to newsgroups for no good reason. Most were roundly
chastised. Some ran away and were never heard from again. Others learned
to play well with others.
However, while there were many "MAKE MONEY FAST" postings in the early 90s
and even the 80s, they were usually one-off postings, each one by a different
person. Thus they weren't called spam (until after ARMM, below.)
In 1993, Richard Depew tried to make some changes in USENET. He advanced
a somewhat controversial idea called retro-moderation, where newsgroups
would be semi-moderated (that is to say, regulated so that not all postings
would appear) through a moderator who canceled postings that broke the
rules.
Moderated groups were common, but with those, each posting was pre-screened
by the moderator. He suggested allowing a moderator to screen after the
fact. Because this was new, and reminded people of censorship (since
canceling the postings of others was normally a major faux pas), this was
quite controversial. Depew got his own fan group, and both allies and
detractors.
However, what really got people upset was March 31, 1993. He had been
playing with some software to perform the retro-moderation task. His
software, called ARMM, had a bug, and he ran it, and it ended up posting
200 messages in a row to news.admin.policy, the newsgroup where people
discussed the running of the net.
You can see
It really ticked people off, and some people, knowing the term from MUDs,
called it a spam. The very day ARMM was run, Joel Furr, as far as I can
tell, was the
Depew himself shortly
The first major USENET spam came on January 18 of 1994. Every single newsgroup
found in it a religious screed declaring:
This one caused a ton of debate and controversy. The Andrews University
sysadmin (Clarence Thomas, no relation) who sent it generated a flurry of
complaints against his institution
and some press, though reportedly he never got more than a mild punishment
at the time. He did however eventually leave the University, but was also
known to have done some more minor religious spams at later dates.
Normally in USENET you can post a message to more than one newsgroup using
the "crossposting" mechanism. The advantage with this is that the message
only goes out once, and people who read both newsgroups only see it once.
This feature is highly useful if not abused, yet most major conferencing
systems never implemented it.
However, it was not practical to crosspost to every single newsgroup, nor
desired. Still, this event provided a button at the USENIX Unix conference
saying "Jesus is coming and he doesn't know how to crosspost."
One of the most annoying things about this message was that not only did
you see it again, and again, for every newsgroup you read, but it also
showed up as the only message of the day in newsgroups that had low
traffic levels. Most people like their low traffic newsgrous with low
traffic, and this posting and others like it would soon spoil that
serenity.
Around four months after the Jesus spam, in April of 1994, Canter
and Siegel posted
the famous
Unlike prior net abusers, Canter and Siegel didn't turn tail and run. They
were proud of it, even though net residents attacked in return, flooding
their phone lines, fax machine and mail boxes. Every account they had
associated with this activity was pulled. Their ISP was overloaded by
the heat of the reaction, actually hurting a lot of people.
They were unrecalcitrant, and this is what really made people angry. This
spam made the newspapers; it made them famous. They announced plans to
form a consulting company to post such ads for other people. They
wrote and got published a book about their exploits with the long title
of: How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway : Everyone's
Guerrilla Guide to Marketing on the Internet and Other On-Line Services.
The book was dreadful, and didn't sell well, and in a remarkable show
of restraint, people on the net ignored calls to stage protests at their
book signings, and instead ignored them. It worked, and they vanished
into deserved obscurity.
I wrote this to be a history of the term spam, though
that required a bit of the history of the act itself. Keith Lynch has a
history of USENET
which can now be filled out with the use of google.
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Spam did a lot to ruin USENET, unfortunately. Newsgroup spam was brought
into check, oddly enough, by people applying Depew's ARMM principles with
better software engineering skills. Today the only reason USENET manages
at all is an army of anti-spam software that send out cancels and
But E-mail spam caused even more harm, in a way. Records show people
quickly started talking about email spams not long after the term became
popular for USENET spam. As E-mail spam grew, it became apparent
that many mailings were being generated to anybody who had posted to
a USENET newsgroup. Programs were "harvesting" the addresses from messages
to make mailing lists and send junk mail to them.
This in turn made people afraid to participate in the net. Post to the net
(or go into a chat room) with your real E-mail address, and you would
soon find your mailbox flooded with spam. Not very appealing.
A number of people left the net or stopped posting altogether.
Others took to no longer
putting their real e-mail address in their postings, either putting in a
useless address, or putting in an address that a live human could figure
how to change into the real one.
One great damage of that was it broke the E-mail reply function in USENET.
One thing that had made USENET quite different in the early days from other
online conferences like BBSs and Compuserve was that not only could you
reply to a posting with E-mail, you were often expected to. The recipient
was expected to summarize replies if they were interesting. That way it
kept down (but certainly didn't eliminate) private messages and me-too
posts presented to everybody. You were supposed to take your flame wars
to E-mail; now it's very difficult to do so.
I did this research because I've been doing a lot of thinking about the
spam problem and solutions to it, particularly in E-mail. I have a
page of essays on spam if you are curious.
When Google expanded their USENET archive to go back 20 years, it became
possible for the first time to really research these questions again.
By the way, Hormel eventually
At about the same time as I was researching this, I wrote an article for
the O'Reilly Network called
Other Etymology (Net-Surfing)
The new USENET archive at google is a gold-mine for etymology. For
example, a bit of research seems to show that the term "net-surfing"
originated with Brendan Kehoe, also known as the author of "Zen and
the art of the Internet," an early internet book.
In
However, others claim independent coinage, including possibly Mark McCahil
the Gopher developer (they used the metaphor a lot) and others back to the
80s who talked about Information Surfing. Paul Saffo used the
term "information surfing" in a
In addition, the term "channel surfing" shows first use
in January 91, and seems to have originated at the same time. Several
of the early users of forms of the term claim they did so due to a love of
real water surfing, so this appears to be a metaphor of many parents.
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