April 13, 2004
On April 12, 1994, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, two lawyers from Arizona, flooded the Internet with a mass mailing promoting their law firm's advisory services. Ten years later, junk e-mail has ballooned into an epidemic of massive proportions, threatening the very future of e-mail. Once billed as the Net's killer app for both business and consumers, e-mail senders are now largely aware that their messages may not be seen or read, because they may have been accidentally swept aside by antispam measures. The annual economical cost of spam is estimated at around 17 billion Euros, making it a hot topic worldwide. Read more about the tenth "anniversary" of spam at CNET.