Every day--every hour--it comes, and just try to stop it.
Spamming costs businesses $8 billion to $10 billion per year in
lost productivity, as entrepreneurs and employees constantly rid
their e-mail boxes of the unwanted promises: Get out of debt; get
12 CDs for the price of one; enhance your sexual prowess. And Gary
Thuerk is to blame for it all. As a young, ambitious computer
salesperson, he sent the first spam to 600 people on an early
version of the Internet in 1978. Today, Thuerk is married with
three grown kids, works as a sales representative at
Hewlett-Packard, and actually appears to be a nice guy. After
explaining why he did what he did, he even gave us his e-mail
address. "But don't print it," he begs.
What do you personally think of spam?
Is it good or bad?
Gary Thuerk: I think
it's more annoying than anything else. Incidentally, I
don't get a lot of spam. I don't do the things people do
that get them on those lists. And the last time I ended up getting
on a spam list, I changed my account. I really don't surf the
Net or belong to any chat groups or to any places where they post
bulletin boards.
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So if you had the chance to send the
first spam again, would you do it?
Thuerk: Yes. Because it was
a fast and efficient way to get the word out about our new product.
The only thing that's changed is, when we CC'd, we had to
type each name out by hand. We didn't know you could build a
group of addresses. I sent [product information] to an organization
I was a member of, giving them a notice about technology that had
become commercially available, as opposed to a lot of these
e-mails, which are a shot in the dark. Of course, some people make
a fortune out of that.
Presumably, there are some decent
entrepreneurs who want to use spam for good, not evil. Any advice
on using spam correctly?
Thuerk: It's worth the
effort to find the target audience rather than sending it to
everybody in the world, because you'll have a more respectable
image. And I tell people on the other side to delete all forwarding
addresses in e-mails. Because while you might be forwarding it to
some trustworthy people, eventually it's going to get into the
wrong hands.
So do people give you death threats or
dirty looks when they learn you started it all?
Thuerk: At a trade show
recently, one guy introduced me to someone as the Father of Spam. I
ended up autographing stuff and taking pictures with people. They
asked, "What was it like? What did you do?" A bit of
celebrity has entered my life.
Geoff Williams is a writer in Loveland, Ohio. He can be
contacted at gwilliams1@cinci.rr.com.