Today is the 30th anniversary of what is generally considered the first spam message: a poorly constructed post by some employees at DEC inviting members of Arpanet (the Defense Department network that morphed into today’s Internet) to a demonstration of some new models of the DEC-20.
I may never be remembered for this, but I was actually one of the first people to provide an anti-spam product; in the fall of 1997 I seeded some Usenet groups with posts from fake addresses (the first of which can be seen in Google’s Usenet archive here) and started capturing all mail that came to those addresses. My software then sorted through the messages, added the sender’s addresses to killfiles (and if more than 1,000 spam were received from a domain, the entire domain name went in), flagged the subject lines (and, later on, started looking for common phrases and flagging them, too), and also looked for common header lines and repeating IP addresses, which then had subnets blocked in a similar manner to the way I flagged entire domains.
Then I would post the latest versions of the killfile, updated four times a day, to a website where people could download it. I eventually added several formats (including “score” files, Netscape and Eudora filters, etc.) as people requested them.
“Oasel the Spam-Catcher” was in continuous operation for over three years, from August of 1997 to January of 2001, by which time my techniques had become less effective as spammers became more ingenious. (Not that I think they were trying to outwit me, specifically, it’s just that my tactics were the same that people used by hand when sorting their mail, only automated.) I accidentally preserved the last update to the page as I moved CNX from server to server over the intervening years, although the actual killfiles are lost to history; they were on my old OS/2 machine, and references to them went right to that machine’s IP address, so I could update quickly. If you’re curious about it, you can see it at http://cnx.com/stopspam.html.
Of course, today there are constantly updated blacklists, Bayesian filters, and services that do all the blocking automatically. I would like to think that somewhere, deep in the recesses of Spam history, I helped provide a little inspiration, and served as a cog in a greater machine.
That is a cool story.