Arpanet, it's worth remembering, was a U.S. government property at the time, “not intended for public distribution although not ‘top secret’ either,” as another response to the DEC spam put it. One devil's advocate arguing for a freer use of the email medium made what may be the earliest reference to Internet dating: “Would a dating service for people on the net be 'frowned upon' [by Arpanet administrators]? I hope not.” (The author of this prescient email happened to be legendary programmer and free software advocate Richard Stallman.)

On the whole, though, unsolicited emailers were pariahs in the early days of the Internet. They offered a first glimpse of a future in which digital gatekeepers selected by government agencies and elite universities got swamped by a horde of anonymous jerks and tacky advertisements. These early debates about the form and function of electronic messages heralded the public, uncontrolled, and uncensored Internet we know today.

The history of trolling over long distances, however, stretches back at least to the Victorian era.

Robert Whitaker, a historian of international crime and policing, studies fraudulent letters from the 19th and early 20th centuries that were part of an international con known as the Spanish Prisoner Scheme. “In this confidence trick,” he explains,

the criminal contacts the victim offering a large sum of money in return for a small advance of funds that the criminal—posing as a distressed yet reputable person—cannot provide because of some impediment (usually imprisonment or illness)… The successful prisoner is one that can combine a too-good-to-be-true offer with a compelling narrative that the victim can, literally, buy into.

As Whitaker notes, schemes like this strike us as modern inventions, the provenance of Nigerian email scammers and shady characters on Craigslist trying to get you to wire them money. Yet the human desire for lucre—and the unscrupulousness methods we often employ in its pursuit—knows few limitations, geographic or historic. As Whitaker desribes, the main difference between our 21st-century cons and those of the Victorian period is one of delivery method.

Whitaker has uncovered documents from 1905 supposedly written by a distressed Spaniard named Luis Ramos and Jean Richard, a prison chaplain. Addressed to a London shopkeeper named Paul Webb, these letters are straight out of the email scam playbook: Ramos claims to have “property valuable to £37.000” deposited “in a sure English Bank,” and he’ll give Webb a cut if the Englishman agrees to send Ramos a small amount of money to bail his 14-year-old daughter out of prison.

This early scam letter is also very much of its time, though: Whitaker shrewdly observes that it resembles a Dickensian novel, complete with an imprisoned child who “seeks a new guardian to share a large inheritance amidst the backdrop of continental political intrigue.”