Saturday, May 3, 2008 will mark a very memorable day in the Internet’s history – although not one everyone would want to celebrate. This Saturday marks the 30th anniversary of the most widely hated kind of emails: spam.

May 3, 1978 was the day that the first spam email was sent by a marketer working for the now-defunct DEC computer company, according to an article published on news.com.au. The email reached about 400 people on the West Coast of the United States, and was an invitation to a product launch for DEC.

The amount, execution and use of spam has changed and expanded in many ways over the past 30 years. Between 2004 and 2008, Gmail (the email system supported by the Google search engine) reported that the amount of spam sent to accounts quadrupled, according to news.com.au.

While that first message in 1978 was sent to 400 people by manually typing in each email address, spam now is sent out via botnets. Botnets are able to access computers that have low or incorrect security settings and then are able to send out thousands of emails every day, according to news.com.au.

Spam is usually used for fairly harmless purposes, such as trying to sell people supplements, fashions or other merchandise. Spam, however, can be used for much more malicious endeavors. Last year, spammers shut down the government website of the country of Estonia by attacking the site with traffic. This kind of spammer is known as an ‘online extortionist’, according to news.com.au.

So, if you happen to see a spam message in your email inbox Saturday morning, just smile to yourself as you hit ‘delete’. As much as it is an annoyance, spam appears to be one of the mainstays in the development of the online world.

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