Another news flash: One of the most annoying aspects of the internet, spam, is 25 years old this weekend. Net historians have trawled records and found that the first junk e-mail message hawking a company or its wares was sent back in 1978. Coincidentally, the first commercial spam sent to Usenet discussion groups was sent a little over 10 years ago. Now spam is thought to account for up to 40% of all e-mail messages sent across the net and many industry groups, companies and technologists are uniting to fight the flood.



A Monty Python sketch led to junk mail being called spam