Tag: Digital Spam

Digital Spam encompasses all forms of junk content regardless of digital delivery mechanism, email or otherwise.

“While the most widely recognized form of spam is email spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet news-group spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, online classified ads spam, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet forum spam, junk fax transmissions, social spam, spam mobile apps, television advertising and file sharing spam.”
—Wikipedia, “Spamming”

The first reported case of digital spam occurred in 1978 and was attributed to Digital Equipment Corporation, who announced their new computer system to over 400 subscribers of ARPANET, the precursor network of modern Internet. The first mass email campaign occurred in 1994, known as the USENET green card lottery spam: the law firm of Canter & Siegel advertised their immigration-related legal services simultaneously to over 6,000 USENET newsgroups. This event contributed to popularizing the term spam.

Email spam has mainly two purposes, namely advertising (for example, promoting products, services, or contents), and fraud (for example, attempting to perpetrate scams, or phishing). Neither ideas were particularly new or unique to the digital realm: advertisement based on unsolicited content delivered by traditional post mail (and, later, phone calls, including more recently the so-called “robo-calls”) has been around for nearly a century. As for scams, the first reports of the popular advance-fee scam (in modern days known as 419 scam, a.k.a. the Nigerian Prince scam), called the Spanish Prisoner scam were circulating in the late 1800s.
—CACM, “The History of Digital Spam“