ChrisSandel.com

On this day 30 years ago the first ever email spam email message was sent.  (Not to be confused with the pseudo-lunch meat which celebrated it’s 80th birthday last year.)  Back then there weren’t many people to send it to (it went out to 393 people).  This Yahoo report explains the whole story and the controversy that it caused. 

Everyone knows what spam is but wikipedia explains just how widespread it has become.  “Spam in e-mail started to become a problem when the Internet was opened up to the general public in the mid-1990s. It grew exponentially over the following years, and today comprises some 80 to 85% of all the email in the world, by conservative estimate; some sources go as high as 95%.”