Internet Defense Technology

Update: Well it seems there is some controversy about the exact date and years (no surprise) with articles about the 30th birthday of Spam in early May. It does seem it is around this time and certainly a lot of years.

Today (Apr 8th) is the birthday of spam, 15 years ago Joel Furr defined “spam” and after that the web phenomenon evolved.

According to Wikipedia and Brad Templeton, Furr is one of the earliest people to refer to unsolicited electronic messages as “spam“.

The term “spam” had been widely used by Monty Python fans to describe excessive torrents of verbiage on electronic chat systems remember the Vikings chanting “spam spam spam spam spam, WONDERFUL SPAM” in the legendary Python sketch.

Furr used the term in the USENET newsgroup news.admin.policy to describe an out-of-control automated robo-moderation system known as ARMM.

While he didn’t coin the phrase, he appears to have been the first to use it to describe the phenomenon as it applied to USENET newsgroups.

Makes you wonder if it would have been so bad without the name. Well, not really, but sometimes don’t you wish we could wish it away.

Original article on IDT Blog about email spam

So Microsoft has filed a patent to expand on the “external” data they use to rank pages and include information gotten from emails that are considered spam.

Most spam emails have a link back to a website and the search engine spiders can follow those links and use it as a factor in ranking pages.

I am sure the other search engines (like Google and Yahoo with their own email platforms) can do this same which will hopefully have a good effect on spam. Make website owners less interested in spamming people, hopefully a good thing.

Search engine spam detection using external data
Invented by Bama Ramarathnam, Eric B. Watson, Janine Ruth Crumb
Assigned to Microsoft
US Patent 7,349,901
Granted: March 25, 2008
Filed: May 21, 2004

Original article on IDT Blog about email spam