The scourge of the Internet has reached a major milestone in its life. The first ever unsolicited email was sent way back in1978, on 3rd May, to 400 people. The email was advertising a company known as DEC, a computer manufacturer that is no longer in existence. Unfortunately, spam not only lives on but continues to grow in strength.
The BBC website has a cracking list of statistics to depress every email user on the planet. Email scamsters made more than £120m last year with more than three quarters of all successful scams being delivered by junk email. Nearly 85% of all email sent is spam, equivalent to more than 100 billion obnoxious messages every single day.
While unsolicited email has been around for 30 years, the term Spam was only coined in 1993 by a Usenet administrator, who took his inspiration from a Monthy Python sketch.
While spam is predominantly seen as being a major nuisance, it can and does often harbour more serious and underhand intent. Fraudsters and scamsters use spam email as a means to unlawfully gain information, or to perpetrate the downloading of infected files onto user’s computers.
