Greetings all followers
Since we all use computers, we are all concerned about SPAM. No, not the Viking kind, not the lunch meat kind; the computer kind of SPAM

But SPAM has history longer than most know. The first use of the Advance-fee scam SPAM was during the French Revolution (1789) [2]. A person would receive a letter called the Spanish Prisoner Letter. It would ask for a small fee to help get a French aristocrat out of a dangerous area.

In the 1804 the telegraph was used to send spam. Western Union allowed telegraphic messages on its network to be sent to multiple destinations. The first recorded instance of a mass unsolicited commercial telegram is from May 1864, when some British politicians received an unsolicited telegram advertising a dentist.[3]

Another well-known fraud also got its start in 1920 when P. Crentsil sent the first “419” or advanced-fee fraud letter to a contact in the British colony of the Gold Coast, today’s Ghana. Crentsil signed himself “P. Crentsil, Professor of Wonders.” He was charged in 1921 with three counts of violating section 419 of Nigeria’s criminal code, and a whole industry was born. [4]

After computer networks where established, the first known email spam (although not yet called that), was sent on May 3, 1978 [1]. It was an advertisement for a presentation by Digital Equipment Corporation for their DECSYSTEM-20 products.

It was the 1970s when SPAM became the term used for unwanted messages (usually jokes or Monty Python sketches) college students would send to everyone. The term derives from a famous Monty Python sketch, first broadcast in 1970, where a couple ordering breakfast is confronted with a menu that is heavy on one specific ingredient, SPAM. [5]

It was not until 1993 that SPAM was first officially used as a term. From a post from USENET by Richard Depew to news.admin.policy, which was the result of a bug in a software program that caused 200 messages to go out to the news group. [6]

So you see we are not unique in dealing with SPAM. But we are more aware, because of the Internet, of the types of SPAM and how we can avoid falling for them.

May you enjoy the Internet and not get entrapped by spam.
TG

--- Citations

[1]
History of email spam
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histo....._of_email_spam

[2]
Spam: A History of Phishing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQnB18vYGMw
timemark 8:50. Spam has it roots in the French Revolution (1789)

[3]
Spamming
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamming

[4]
[Infographic] A history of fraud: from ancient Egypt to the modern pandemic (Part 2)
June 4, 2020
https://www.trulioo.com/blog/history-fraud-2

[5]
Please Don't Delete This Interview About Spam
May 4, 2013
https://www.npr.org/sections/alltec.....iew-about-spam
Look for the section "On how a Monty Python sketch became the name for all that unwanted email"

[6]
The History of Spam
Timeline of events and notable occurrences in the advance of spam
July 2014
https://www.internetsociety.org/wp-.....20of20Spam.pdf

--- Other articles about SPAM you may find interesting

Advance-fee scam
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance-fee_scam

Black money scam
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_money_scam

https://www.socketlabs.com/blog/know-history-spam/

Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet [Excerpt, Part 1]
https://www.scientificamerican.com/.....erpt-part-one/

Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet [Excerpt, Part 2]
https://www.scientificamerican.com/.....erpt-part-two/

Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet [Excerpt, Part 3]
https://www.scientificamerican.com/.....pt-part-three/