Spam. Lately there has been a great deal of confusion around the term – but here friend of Save the Mail Tim comes to the rescue with some much needed insight on the term, and email abuse in general.

To really dive into where email is at today, we first have to dive into where it all started.  And in the case of email, that’s goes back to the 60s and 70s when an email communications network was assembled for use almost exclusively by research scientists.  The goal of email was simple: get work done – faster & more easily.

But in 1978 one man realized that this network happened to be the target audience for a new product he was selling (a digital mainframe) and he sent an “unsolicited, commercial email” to this entire database.  When Gary Thuerk, “father of spam,” sent this short note out spam was born.

And today, we find our inboxes cluttered with messages, many of which we don’t even want.  But few of these messages are “commercial” in nature.  In fact, increasingly these messages fall into 1 of 3 categories:

1. A flat out CON (those messages hawking Viagra, fake replica watches, or Canadian pharmaceuticals)
2. A phishing attempt (those messages trying to obtain personal message via email)
3. True attack messaging (those messages trying to sneak a Trojan or virus into your system)

Unfortunately, no friendly message from Gary Thuerk in the mix here: it is flat out EMAIL ABUSE. Check out the video above for the whole story.

Over the next few weeks you’ll see more and more of these popping up and we hope you find each of them both interesting and useful (if you don’t – let us know!).  The world of email is growing increasingly complicated and our goal here will be to arm you with the knowledge you need to protect yourself and participate in the conversation.