30th Anniversary of Email Spam

Spam spam spam spam. Lovely spam! Wonderful spam!

Here's one birthday I think we could all do without. May 3 is spam's birthday, and we can cry if we want to! Thirty years ago, an evil marketer named Gary Thuerk sent out 393 unsolicited e-mails to users of a government run network that would one day become the internet. And just like that, spam was born.

While Thuerk's spam caused the same outrage 30 years ago that it does today, I'm guessing that he had no idea that spam would one day become a multi-billion dollar industry. With almost 120 billion spam messages being sent per day, I think Thuerk might have reconsidered his actions if he knew what kind of monster he was creating. I'm not exactly sure how to celebrate spam's birthday, but something tells me that sending 950,000 unsolicited birthday cards might be a good start.