Stephen Hinde - spam: evolution of a nuisance: Spam: the evolution of a nuisance

Junk e-mail (spam) is twenty five years old - the first junk e-mail was sent on the Arpanet, the fore runner to the Internet, in 1978. Not that there has been any cracking open of the bottles of bubbly to celebrate. It did not receive the spam designation until ten years ago based on the Monty Python sketch in which customers of a restaurant are offered spam with everything. Ironically, companies that offer anti-spam software are being threatened with breach of trademark litigation if they include the word spam in the product title by the company that owns the spam trademark. (for those of you unacquainted with spam, it is a tinned pork luncheon meat that really took off during the Second World War which declined in popularity in the Sixties).