Spam Wars: The Battle History

NNTP: Usenet Gets Spammed.

The only constant in the Great Spam War is change.

Perhaps now we (tinw) will see street corner dealers selling/hawking/pushing monthly Bullet Proof Hosting to those hooked on spamming, a known and destructive addictive behaviour.

-- Sun Tsu - The Art of War

Rob Noha, using the account JJ@cup.portal.com posted on May 24, 1988 to as many newsgroups as he could find a plea to HELP ME! and send money to his college fund, as he was, he claimed, running out.

Thus the first USENET spam was, in a sense, a charity spam. Or perhaps charity 'scam' is a better word.
JJ posted to many groups, but each post was crossposted to 4 or 5 newsgroups, to reduce the total volume, but still annoy.

However, nobody ever used the term "spam" to refer to this posting until 1996. It did spark a lot of debate about the merits of having sites like Portal, which sold accounts to anybody with a few dollars. This somewhat elitist viewpoint got even more prevalent when AOL was poised to join the fray.

I have not found a record confirming this. But all reports I have seen agree that 31 March 1993 was the date a Usenet post was first identified as Spam.

In April of 1994, the term was not born, but it did jump a great deal in popularity when two lawyers from Phoenix named Canter and Siegel posted a message advertising their fairly useless services in an upcoming U.S. "green card" lottery. This wasn't the first such abusive posting, nor the first mass posting to be called a spam, but it was the first deliberate mass posting to commonly get that name. They had posted their message a few times before, but on April 12, they hired an mercenary programmer to write a simple script to post their ad to every single newsgroup (message board) on USENET, the world's largest online conferencing system. There were several thousand such newsgroups, and each one got the ad.

Quickly people identified it as "spam" and the word caught on. Future multiple postings soon got the appelation. Some people also applied it to individual unwanted ads that weren't posted again and again, though generally it was associated with the massive flood of the same message. It turns out, however, that the term had been in use for some time before the famous green card flood.

Source: Brad Templeton.