Netiquette Sillies

["guest@endurance.net" <guest@endurance.net>]

Linda B. Merims lbm@ici.net

Just a note on the derivation of "spam" used to denote bulk
junk email...

The practise of "spamming" originated on USENET a few years
after the Internet was opened to commercial activity in
1992.  USENET was a system of 5000+ "newsgroups" similar
in structure to Ridecamp that originated in the early 1980s. It
was, at the time, the major mechanism by which people with
shared interests on the Internet communicated with one another.

The most notorious early example of spam was the two "Green Card
Lawyers" Cantor and Siegel in Arizona who, for the very
first time, sent the same off-topic message--an advertisement
for legal services to expedite the processing of immigrants'
green card applications (thus also presaging the general
sleaze quotient of most spam)--to all 5,000 then-existing USENET
newsgroups.  I believe this was early 1994.  Their Internet
service provider Netcom promptly kicked them off, and they promptly
sued Netcom in return claiming there was nothing in their Netcom service
contract that prevented them from doing this.  Cantor and
Siegel lost, but all ISPs began making clients sign Terms of Service
agreements that, among other things, forbid sending spam.

The rage that met Cantor and Siegel's action was phenomenal,
and they became the pariahs of the Internet world.  Alas,
there was plenty more like them and despite the "cancelbots"
developed that chase spam on USENET cancelling most spam articles
before they are seen, and the "USENET Death Penalty" imposed
on ISPs that still permitted customers to send spam (an
agreement among certain key routing sites to refuse to
forward *all* traffic originating from ISPs that allowed their
clients to spam), last I heard (admittedly four or five years
ago) more than 3/4 the traffic on USENET was either spam or
spam cancelbots.

Spam via email came later.

"Spam" as a term to describe this stuff was actually inspired,
not by the distasteful content of the meat product, but by
the Monty Python "spam" sketch.  This is the sketch where
the vikings are sitting in the restaurant and the couple
come in and all there is to order is eggs, bacon, spam and
spam, or eggs, hash, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, and spam,
(&etc.)  I.e.,--many copies of the same thing.  The term
was already in use, with Monty Python the identified inspiration,
by 1994.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about spam is how little
of it you actually see.  Those few early USENET system
administrators who took a hard line on USENET spam set
the tone for all ISPs.  No respectable ISP tolerates a
spammer--USENET or email.  The subterfuge that a company
now has to go through to send spam kind of guarantees that
only the fabulously ignorant (the ones who put 1-800 numbers
in their spam) or the fabulously sleazy send it.  It also
explains why spam seems to come in "waves."  The spam house
finds an open SNMP gateway they can bounce their spam off,
(usually a clueless offshore ISP) they send out a whole
flock of spam, the people who know how to trace the true
origin of this stuff contact the ISP's administrator explaining
what is going on, how they are being used, and how to close
the door, the ISP closes the door, and things go quiet for
a few days while the spammers find another clueless ISP to
relay their junk.

I just hope spam continues to be viewed as an unacceptable
method for legitimate enterprises to conduct their business.
If the floodgates ever open, you'll never dig your way out
of the garbage.

And if anybody still doesn't understand why spam in cyberspace
is different from junk mail in the real world, it is because
it is the only form of advertisement that places the overwhelming
majority of the cost of transmitting the message on the
*receivers* of the message, not on the *senders*.  The
telemarketer has to pay for the phone call.  The bulk mailer
has to pay for the postage.  The email spammer needs only
a few seconds of an ISP's computer time to send their millions
of messages.  (And even then, that account is often opened with
a stolen credit card number.)  It is the system as a whole--the
routing sites, the destination ISPs, and the message receivers
that foot the real bill.  At one point in 1997 AOL was estimating
that half its incoming email disk storage space was being taken
up by spam.

Sorry.  One of my hot buttons...

Linda B. Merims
TINC--There is no cabal! (In-joke among spam fighters.) 
lbm@ici.net
Massachusetts, USA
ARPANET/Internet citizen since 1976