Spam has been around since the beginning of the internet – don’t believe me? Just take a look at the first spam message ever sent, which was reportedly sent on May 3rd, 1978 through ARPANET (a system consisting of mostly universities and large corporations), although the first major, mass spam event came when a law firm starting posting advertisements on Usenet in 1994. And ever since then internet users have had a need for some sort of anti-spam solution. But what were some of the first spam filters on the market, and how effective were they?

The first spam blockers available for use on the World Wide Web were quite primitive compared to the anti-spam filters we have access today – but at least it was something. These worked by picking up on certain words, spellings of words, or phrases that were, at the time, most commonly being used in spam e-mail. Believe it or not this was actually quite effective; at first.

Once the spammer themselves were able to figure this out, however, it wasn’t hard to start using newer words and phrases – ones that weren’t marked as spam in the first spam blockers. Because of this, anti-spam companies had to evolve, and in the late 90’s new technologies such as Bayesian filtering (which used computer-learning algorithms and advanced artificial intelligence) and DNS blacklisting (the process of blocking the internet connections of known spammers) were introduced.

In 2002 the first commercial spam blocking software was introduced, and since then many improvements have been made in anti-spam software. But where there’s a will there’s a way, and professional spammers will always find a loophole or some trick to get around even the most advanced spam filtering measures, however – after all, they do this for a living.