Digital Trends

Doubtless you spent yesterday celebrating the birthday of spam. Yes, it was May 1, 1978 when Gary Thuerk of DEC spent the first spam e-mail on the Internet’s ancestor, Arpanet. But security company Sophos thinks that three decades is long enough, and has begun Spam Pledge to try and eradicate spam. Good luck on that.

 

"Gary Thuerk could never have imagined what he was starting when he sent that mass email 30 years ago," Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, said."There is a generation of people today who have never worked in a world without spam clogging up their inboxes. What's worse is that a lot of spam is deliberately malicious, aiming to steal bank account information or install malware. People who buy goods via spam are merely perpetuating the problem for all users and must be stopped."

 

What Sophos hopes to achieve by Spam Pledge is to stop people responding to spam, and that means either buying what the mails offer or clicking on the links. Perhaps remarkably, a recent survey conducted by the company revealed that 11% of respondents said they’d actually bought items via spam mail.

 

Sophos has even created a Facebook Spam Pledge group, and a YouTube video (which could possibly be a bit tongue in cheek) of people taking the Spam Pledge.