April 12: The First Internet Spam

Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, partners in a husband-and-wife law firm, created and posted the first commercial Internet spam message on this date in 1994. Their message, advertising their services in helping to obtain green cards for immigrants, went out to some 100,000 Usenet accounts and prompted such protest that their Internet provider was overwhelmed, crashed twice, and terminated their service. In 1997, the Tennessee Supreme Court disbarred Canter, in part for his advertising practices. Today, more than 200 billion spam messages are sent out every day, accounting for about 90 percent of e-mail traffic.

“The best I can recall we probably made somewhere between $100,000 to $200,000 related to that — which wasn’t remarkable in itself, except that the cost of doing it was negligible.” —Laurence Canter