More than a hundred billion unwanted messages clog computer networks every day. NANOSPORE LLC

In the spring of 1978, an energetic marketing man named Gary Thuerk wanted to let people in the technology world know that his company, the Digital Equipment Corporation, was about to introduce a powerful new computer system. DEC operated out of an old wool mill in Maynard, Massachusetts, and was well known on the East Coast, but Thuerk hoped to reach the technological community in California as well. He decided that the best way to do it was through the network of government and university computers then known as the Arpanet. Only a few thousand people used it regularly, but their names were conveniently printed in a single directory. After selecting six hundred West Coast addresses, Thuerk realized that he would never have time to call each one of them, or even to send out hundreds of individual messages. Then another idea occurred to him: what if he simply used the network to dispatch a single e-mail to all of them? “We invite you to come see the 2020 and hear about the DECSystem-20 family,’’ the message read. As historic lines go, it didn’t have quite the ring of “One small step for a man,” yet Gary Thuerk’s impact cannot be disputed. When he pushed the send button, he became the father of spam.

The reaction was immediate and almost completely hostile. “This was a flagrant violation of the Arpanet,’’ one recipient wrote. Another noted that “advertising of particular products” should be strongly discouraged on the network. The system administrator promised to respond at once, and Thuerk was harshly reprimanded. Nevertheless, his company sold more than twenty of the computer systems, for a million dollars apiece. Thuerk saw no harm in his actions; he and others viewed the network as an emerging symbol of intellectual freedom. Even if unsolicited e-mail became a nuisance, a greater danger would be posed by placing limits on how this powerful new tool could be deployed. “The amount of harm done by any of the cited ‘unfair’ things the net has been used for is clearly very small,’’ the Internet pioneer Richard Stallman wrote a few days after the DEC e-mail. Stallman opposed any action that would interfere with the aggressive openness that came to define the Web. And he still does. In his message about the DEC spam, Stallman pointed out—three decades before the appearance of Craigs-list and Monster.com—that the network provided a unique opportunity to advertise jobs and an entirely new way to sell products. He went even further: “Would a dating service on the net be ‘frowned upon’ . . . ? I hope not. But even if it is, don’t let that stop you from notifying me via net mail if you start one.”

I have no idea whether anyone on the Arpanet tried to help Stallman find a date, but thousands of people have tried to help me. In the past few weeks, I have received several e-mails from the Dating Adult Friend line, and several dozen from a site called Adult Friend Finder. In addition, there were fourteen messages from someone calling himself Damian Dominques, who offered, repeatedly, to help me meet “delicious babes.” I also received fairly unambiguous invitations for personal interaction from people named Antonia, Heather, Helen, Joyce, Olivia, Kelly, Sally, Sophie, and Sue, among dozens of others.

Wading through dating-service spam is a minor inconvenience compared to dealing with advertisements for products designed to help those dates succeed. I received three hundred and seventeen pieces of mail offering, through surgical, mechanical, and, above all, pharmaceutical means, to help “fatten” my “love muscle,” as one of them put it. There were also several hundred solicitations for low- and no-interest car loans, automatic mortgage approvals, sleeping pills, dubious heart medicines, diet aids, gastric bypass surgery, contact lenses, air-conditioning systems, watches, online casinos, laptops, high-definition television sets, bootleg software, and jobs that promised to let me work at home, do practically nothing, and earn millions of dollars. In all, last month my three principal e-mail addresses pulled in 4,321 messages that went straight into various spam folders. Another hundred or so made it to my in-box. __

As the Web evolves into an increasingly essential part of American life, the sheer volume of spam grows exponentially every year, and so, it would appear, do the sophisticated methods used to send it. Nearly two million e-mails are dispatched every second, a hundred and seventy-one billion messages a day. Most of those messages have something to sell. Even the most foolish and unsavory advertisements can earn money—in part because the economic bar for success is so low. If somebody wants to send you junk mail the old-fashioned way, through the United States Postal Service, he has to pay for it; the more he sends, the greater the expense. With electronic junk mail, the opposite is true: it costs a pittance to send a million messages—or even a billion—and recipients almost always spend more than the sender. (Assume that someone can unleash a hundred million spams from a twenty-dollar broadband account each month; at those rates, a penny would pay for fifty thousand pieces of mail.)

Spam’s growth has been metastatic, both in raw numbers and as a percentage of all mail. In 2001, spam accounted for about five per cent of the traffic on the Internet; by 2004, that figure had risen to more than seventy per cent. This year, in some regions, it has edged above ninety per cent—more than a hundred billion unsolicited messages clogging the arterial passages of the world’s computer networks every day. The flow of spam is often seasonal. It slows in the spring, and then, in the month that technology specialists call “black September”—when hundreds of thousands of students return to college, many armed with new computers and access to fast Internet connections—the levels rise sharply.

Attempts to police the Internet have met with only partial success. On May 23rd, the federal government indicted Robert Alan Soloway on thirty-five counts, including mail fraud, wire fraud, money laundering, and aggravated identity theft. (He has pleaded not guilty.) In its indictment, the government contended that Soloway had sent out tens of millions of illegal e-mails in the past four years, seeking to drum up business for his Internet marketing firm. Federal agents described Soloway, a twenty-seven-year-old Seattle “entrepreneur,’’ as the nation’s spam king, and said that the arrest would have a major effect on the flow of unwanted e-mail. “Taking Soloway off the streets is terrific,’’ I was told not long ago by Matt Sergeant, the chief anti-spam technologist at MessageLabs, one of the leaders in the growing industry dedicated to ridding the Internet of junk mail. “But turn on your computer tomorrow and see if you notice a difference. These guys are sophisticated and they are everywhere. Each time we think we have them, they respond with something new.”

Spam seemed to vanish after the DEC incident of 1978. Throughout the nineteen-eighties, the Internet remained largely the province of academics, few of whom had any desire to see their network turned into a platform for virtual garage sales and dating services. But, driven by the rise of eBay, in the nineties, and other commercial applications, the Internet soon became more powerful than the people who had created it. The World Wide Web was conceived in an environment where trust was assumed and identity never doubted, and that openness has been among its greatest assets and its biggest flaws. The Internet permits individuals to act without supervision, permission, or control. If you have the e-mail address, you can write directly to whomever you want; protocols and rules that have governed written communication for hundreds of years no longer apply. That absolute freedom makes cyberspace an ideal place to agitate for democracy in China, sell seventeenth-century carpets, or blog about early music. Blending these new freedoms with any sense of order or discipline has proved nearly impossible, however, and so has virtually every attempt to contain the explosion of spam.