__1994: __Members of more than 6,000 Usenet discussion groups find themselves the recipients of a message imploring them to use the legal services of Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel to ensure their place in line for a green card from the U.S government.

It didn't matter that most recipients had no need for such services. They'd just been spammed by a company – for the first time in the net's history. Not surprisingly, some lines of the message were in ALL CAPS.

Canter and Siegel went on to notoriety, claiming they'd made $100,000 from their Perl-script spamming. The two remained unrepentant, despite the backlash which led them to lose their hosting and even get Canter disbarred.

The husband-and-wife duo went onto to create a spam-advertising company and pen a how-to titled How to Make a FORTUNE on the Information Superhighway: Everyone's Guerrilla Guide to Marketing on the Internet and Other On-Line Services, still on sale at Amazon.com.

But an outdated online marketing guide is not the duo's true legacy.

That would be spam.

Depending on who is counting, spam now accounts for nearly 90 percent of e-mail traffic – much of it sent through botnets or unscrupulous hosting companies and e-mail firms.

And if there's a medium worth communicating in, it's worth spamming. Message boards, blog comments and social networking sites all have to fight the scourge unleashed by the infamous green-card spam of 1994.

Thankfully spam filters have gotten much better, but those tedious and unreadable captchas are also a reaction to the flood of spam unleashed by Canter and Siegel.

Thanks for reading, and click here to help us collect the millions of dollars we inherited in Nigeria so we can buy some genuine Viagra Rolexes.

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