May 3, 1978
Today, spam emails seem like a necessary evil of the digital age: We all take it for granted that the junk folder in our email account will be full of ads for products we do not want to buy, inappropriate suggestions, spelling attempts by fraudsters to extract the code of our web banking and maybe marriage proposals from Nigerian princes.
What’s one of the most annoying things on the internet today seemed like a good idea to Gary Thuerk 44 years ago.
A marketing executive at a technology company, Thuerk sent the first mass advertising e-mail in 1978 long before such messages were called junk, and went down in history as the “father of spam.”
“I knew I was overdoing it,” Thuerk would later admit. But it was a time very different from today. The Internet did not even exist and most Americans would take another 20 years to get their first email address.
“I wanted to reach as many people as possible and inform them about our new product. “It would be released on December 20 of that year and we did not want to send out invitations,” Thuerk explained.
Thus, the executive of Digital Equipment Corp. sent emails to 400 people through Arpanet, a network considered the forerunner of the internet, informing them of the product presentation the company would make.
And this first spam worked! Digital Equipment Corp. eventually won $ 14 million in orders.
Of course, the negative reactions were not lacking. “Complaints started coming almost immediately,” Thuerk recalls. “The best complaint came from a guy at the University of Utah who said that when he got to his office in the morning, he could not use his computer because spam had taken up all the space on his hard drive.”
A few days after the email was sent, an Arpanet representative called him and he was not at all happy. “He made me promise I would not do it again,” admitted the “father of spam.”
He, however, prefers another title. “I consider myself the father of e-marketing. “There is a difference,” he says.
And surely, that day he did not imagine that he would change the world of information technology, not necessarily for the better.
The numbers show that 85% of the emails sent today are spam. But Thuerk does not think it’s his fault. “No one is blaming the Wright brothers for every problem on the planes,” he explains.
He, however, does everything in his power to hide from spammers. He does not publish his email address and uses a powerful spam blocker.
No one gets rid of spam emails
- 22.43 billion regular emails are sent over the internet every day.
- 85% of emails or 122.33 billion emails a day are spam. However, their number is declining, as in June 2020 it was 316.4 billion per day.
- 36% of spam emails are advertising.
- 31.7% of spam emails are inappropriate content.
- For every 12,500,000 emails they send, spammers get a response.
- Spam emails cost businesses $ 20.5 billion each year.
Money Review
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I have over 8 years of experience in the news industry. I have worked for various news websites and have also written for a few news agencies. I mostly cover healthcare news, but I am also interested in other topics such as politics, business, and entertainment. In my free time, I enjoy writing fiction and spending time with my family and friends.
