Today in 1978, Gary Thuerk, a marketing representative at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), sent an email to all 393 users of the ARPANET on the west coast of the United States. This was possibly the first spam message.
The e-mail was an invitation to a demonstration of DEC’s new Decsystem-20 computer. The message took several days to prepare, as all of the addresses had to be typed in manually. It elicited an immediate and negative reaction. Thuerk received a torrent of complaints and an official reprimand from the administrators of the government-run network.
Estimates of the percentage of email spam range from 45% to 85% of all email traffic today. Identifying spam email and removing it from your inbox has been for many years a successful application of machine learning or what today we call “AI.”