How Bots Were Born From Spam -- How We Get To Next

The first commercial spam message was sent in 1994--at least that's the general consensus. Lawrence Canter and Margaret Siegel had a program written that would post a copy of an advertisement for their law firm's green card lottery paperwork service to every Usenet news group -- about 6,000 of them. Because of the way the messages were posted, Usenet clients couldn't filter out duplicate copies, and users saw a copy of the same message in every group. At the time, commercial use of internet resources was rare (it had only recently become legal) and access to Usenet was expensive. Users considered these commercial-seeming messages to be crass--not only did they take up their time, but they also cost them money.