Return to sender: the spam email turns 45

Estimates vary but the number of spam emails sent every day is now well into the billions. Getty

When Gary Thuerk, an American marketing manager, sent an online pitch to 400 potential clients on ARPANET – a kind of proto internet – on May 3, 1978, he unwittingly started a revolution in digital communications that we are still living with 45 years later.

Mr Thuerk’s messaging blitz netted some hefty profit for his employer, the now-defunct US computing firm Digital Equipment Corp, which made more than $12 million in sales. It also generated a string of complaints. Spam email, one of the banes of modern life, was born.

Estimates vary but the number of spam emails sent every day is now well into the billions, with some sources claiming that the mass messages that clog our inboxes and junk folders account for more than half of all email traffic. According to figures released by Statista in January, the US tops the list of countries for spam emails sent – a colossal 8 billion a day.

Despite the popularity of chat-like services at work such as Slack, Skype or MS Teams, email still remains an indispensable form of corporate communication. The Radicati Group, a technology market research firm, has claimed that the number of email users worldwide was to grow to more than 4.2 billion by the end of last year. It also said that the total number of business and consumer emails sent and received every day was to pass the 333-billion mark. Given the rise of remote working, coupled with the ubiquity of the digital economy and handheld devices that make it easier than ever to send and receive mail, it is safe to assume that those numbers will only increase.

Spam also remains the primary vehicle for sending various types of malware. EPA

If, as some analysts suggest, half of all emails are spam, then aside from the annoyance and intrusion inherent with junk messages, companies and individuals are also being forced to contend with their economic, security and environmental cost.

Statistics compiled by cybersecurity review firm DataProt claim that businesses lose more than $20 billion a year dealing with the global torrent of spam, which has helped drive concurrent growth in software products to filter it out – some market research has suggested that the anti-spam software market, valued at $2.6 billion in 2019, could be worth more than $14.6 billion by 2027.

Spam also remains the primary vehicle for sending various types of malware. Research from US communications company Verizon has claimed that 94 per cent of scammers used email as a delivery method. Mr Thuerk’s 1978 post was a genuine attempt to drum up business for his employer, but spamming in the 21st century covers a range of areas and techniques that go far beyond simply trying to win new customers.

Cybersecurity firm Kaspersky claims that 50 per cent of spam now focuses on topics as diverse as health, IT, personal finance and education. Spam has also grown in sophistication and is no longer confined to email – social media, mobile phones and messaging services have also been press-ganged into spreading unwanted adverts or sinister attempts to commit fraud. Phishing, negative SEO attacks and snowshoeing – where bulk spam emails are sent over several domains and IP addresses to avoid filters – are evidence of the malign evolution that spamming has undergone over the years.

Given the implications of this glut of spam, it seems strange that users are, in the main, left to fend for themselves

The tsunami of spam takes its toll on the environment, too. In the latest edition of his 2010 book How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything, Mike Berners-Lee, professor at Lancaster University's Environment Centre – and brother of World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee – estimated that in 2019, the energy expended to create emails may have produced 150 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. Tech recruitment website CWJobs has an online calculator that adds up how much carbon dioxide email produces, claiming that the average of 140 mails sent and received a day by a typical office worker, would, over the course of a year, create as much carbon dioxide as a flight from London to Bruges.

Given the implications of this glut of spam, it seems strange that users are, in the main, left to fend for themselves, relying on security software, browser extensions or email filters. The response from governments to a problem that has been with us for decades is uneven and disjointed at best.

In 2000, Argentina became the first country in the world to introduce legislation to stamp out email spam, but it was not until 2005 that New York teenager Anthony Greco became the first person to be arrested and charged in the US under federal anti-spam laws.

Greco was accused of using a program to create thousands of bogus accounts on social networking site MySpace to send more than 1.5 million spam messages containing ads for cheap mortgages and adult content. According to the US Department of Justice, MySpace had to spend more than $5,000 to delete the unopened messages from its servers. Greco later pleaded guilty in a Los Angeles court to a single count of threatening to damage MySpace’s computer systems with the intent to extort.

Mr Thuerk – later dubbed the “father of spam” – still works as a speaker and consultant in the US. “Now that I think of it,” he told email marketing company Moosend in February, “I just wanted to show our product to the market.

“That’s where innovation comes, when people try to solve a problem. A lot of early adopters wrote history just by putting different [existing] technologies together and they only did it because they wanted to solve a problem. It was the first and only time that I spammed and that was it. And of course, it didn’t have anything to do with [a] scam.”

It is the law of unintended consequences at play. From an early form of legitimate e-marketing, bulk messaging ballooned into a worldwide nuisance that in its worst form has serious criminal, social and environmental effects. More robust consumer protection coupled with tougher penalties for those caught flooding the web with unwanted messages could be a step in the right direction, but as the spam email nears its 50th anniversary, it’s hard to see a day when we’ll no longer need our junk folders.