Spam celebrates its 40th birthday

The very first spam email was sent by Gary Thuerk to about 400 recipients on 3 May 1978 over the Internet’s predecessor, ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency NETwork). In April 2018, the daily average volume of spam was nearly 375 billion, according to Tallos. The original spam is a canned meat product and email ‘spam’ was named after a sketch from the Monty Python’s Flying Circus comedy programme. The use of the term spam expanded into other electronic communications since then. It is used for unsolicited communication in instant messaging, calls, social media, etc.