Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear SPAM, happy birthday to you!  That’s right according to a report on El Reg, this Saturday (3 May) will see spam celebrate its 30th birthday. 

The dubious record for sending the first piece of spam goes to DEC marketing rep Gary Thuerk who sent the 393 Arpanet subscribers a message which received a fierce backlash from Arpanet (military) administrators as well as a small number of sales.  This is the real reason why we all still receive so much spam… there are actually people out there who buy stuff from it.  Rather amazingly, a recent survey conducted by Sophos showed that 11 per cent of people admit to having bought goods in response to spam messages.

So where did the term “spam” come from?  Research conducted this morning on Google shows that the origin of the term relates to the classic 70’s Monty Python sketch in which someone was trying to order a meal from a restaurant. The restaurant menu only contained dishes made from spam and no matter how much the customer protested “But I don’t like Spam!” they were expected to have it. Throughout the sketch a group of Vikings sang a song with the lyrics “Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam!, Spam! Spam! Spam!, Wonderful Spam!”   As the sketch runs on all that can be heard is “Spam! Spam! Spam!” drowning out all other conversations – something we are all familiar with, with today’s email problem!  

While trying to find out this gem of knowledge, I also stumbled across quite a few spam facts. Here are my top five:
1. About 80% of all spam is sent by fewer than 200 spammers
2. An estimated 95 per cent of all email is spam
3. 80 per cent of phone users worldwide have received spam on their mobile
4. The total volume of spam hit over 100 billion emails per day as of April 2008
5. Bill Gates receives four million e-mails per year, most of them spam.

Anyway, happy birthday spam and expect your birthday present to be some Viagra or something really spectacular as soon as I have received my share of a Nigerian prince’s fortune.  Hopefully it will be with me soon, I sent him all of my bank details as requested the other day…..

Paul Stallard