Our preferred choice of observing this anniversary of spam would be with a sledgehammer, an egregious spammer, and no witnesses. Failing that, we have to fall back on reporting it with the hopes of a better time coming someday.

New Scientist reminded everyone that on May 3rd, 1978, Gary Thuerk dumped a spam on 393 Arpanet recipients. He wasn’t hiding behind a forged address, a botnet, or fast-flux DNS; complaints hits his employer, DEC, over his actions.

Keep in mind this took place at a time when storage was expensive and precious, broadband connectivity equated to 56kbps, and few outside the defense and academic communities even had email accounts. A spammer’s Internet reach basically extended to a handful of facilities in California and a few other states.

Low costs and lucrative return potential motivates spammers today, as does the potential to wreak havoc through stealing company and government secrets via malware delivered by a spam attack. The report noted up to 90 percent of the world’s email at a given time is of a spammy nature.

How times have changed. We hope they will continue to change, though a dream of universal spammer punishment seems unlikely. Any technological advances and motivated efforts that can push the spam fight off people’s desktops, and out to the borders of the networks, benefits everyone. We want to see more of this.