When did spam first appear?

The first recorded spam email was sent in 1978 by Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). He sent an all-caps promotional message to to roughly 393 ARPANET users, advertising DEC's new DECSYSTEM-20 computers and inviting recipients to live demo events in California.

Recipients were furious. The message was unsolicited, irrelevant to most, and cluttered the only communication network they had. One complaint described it as an "egregious violation of network etiquette." But it worked. DEC reportedly made $13 million in sales from that email, which is why we're still dealing with spam 45 years later.

The term "spam" itself comes from a 1970 Monty Python sketch where Vikings chant "Spam, spam, spam" so loudly they drown out everything else in a café. Early internet users adopted the term in the 1980s to describe unwanted messages flooding Usenet newsgroups and email inboxes, drowning out legitimate conversation.

And why this matters today: Thuerk's email kicked off a permanent arms race between senders and mailbox providers. Every spam filter, authentication protocol, and inbox placement algorithm exists because of that first mass promotional email. If you send email for a living, you're navigating the infrastructure built to stop what Thuerk started. Understanding that context helps you see why modern mailboxes care so much about explicit permission and subscriber engagement.

The first anti-spam measures appeared soon after. If you're curious how inboxes fought back, read about the earliest anti-spam tactics.