Junk email is named after singing Vikings in a 1970 Monty Python sketch
In a 1970 Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch, a café menu puts Spam in nearly every dish while a chorus of Vikings drowns out all talk by chanting its name. Early internet users borrowed the joke for anything that floods a conversation, and the word stuck to junk messages everywhere.
Mass unsolicited advertising predates computers. In May 1864 several British politicians received an unrequested telegram promoting a dentist. The first documented electronic case came on May 3, 1978, when Gary Thuerk of Digital Equipment Corporation had his assistant Carl Gartley send one message about new DEC computers to 393 ARPANET users at once instead of writing to each separately. The community was furious, but some machines sold.
The word arrived in the 1980s on bulletin boards and multi-user dungeon games, where pranksters typed Spam over and over to push everyone else's text off screen, sometimes to drive newcomers or rival fans out, as when Star Wars enthusiasts swamped Star Trek chat rooms. On Usenet it came to mean posting the same message to newsgroup after newsgroup, with Joel Furr among the first to use it that way; a short-lived rival term, velveeta, covered excessive crossposting. In 1998 the New Oxford Dictionary of English added the internet meaning.
Commercial spam began in earnest on March 5, 1994, when the lawyer couple Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel blasted Usenet with ads for immigration services, the Green Card spam. They called critics anti-commerce radicals and wrote a book on making a fortune from the information superhighway. Attention soon shifted to email. Once the internet opened to business in the mid-1990s, junk mail exploded, reaching roughly 80 to 85 percent of all email by 2007 on a conservative estimate, before falling to 66 percent according to Symantec's 2014 threat report. By 2009 most spam was in English, and senders turned to machine translation to reach other languages.
The economics explain its persistence. Senders pay only for mailing lists, servers, address ranges and domains, and are hard to hold to account, while lost productivity, fraud and extra network capacity fall on the public and internet providers. Many jurisdictions have legislated against it. The same abuse turns up in texts, forums, blogs, wikis, search results, apps and even fax machines.
Source: Spamming
