The Father of Spam Half of all e-mail sent today is spam. What does the man who started it all think of it now?
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Every day--every hour--it comes, and just try to stop it.Spamming costs businesses $8 billion to $10 billion per year inlost productivity, as entrepreneurs and employees constantly ridtheir e-mail boxes of the unwanted promises: Get out of debt; get12 CDs for the price of one; enhance your sexual prowess. And GaryThuerk is to blame for it all. As a young, ambitious computersalesperson, he sent the first spam to 600 people on an earlyversion of the Internet in 1978. Today, Thuerk is married withthree grown kids, works as a sales representative atHewlett-Packard, and actually appears to be a nice guy. Afterexplaining why he did what he did, he even gave us his e-mailaddress. "But don't print it," he begs.
What do you personally think of spam?Is it good or bad?
Gary Thuerk: I thinkit's more annoying than anything else. Incidentally, Idon't get a lot of spam. I don't do the things people dothat get them on those lists. And the last time I ended up gettingon a spam list, I changed my account. I really don't surf theNet or belong to any chat groups or to any places where they postbulletin boards.
So if you had the chance to send thefirst spam again, would you do it?
Thuerk: Yes. Because it wasa 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 totype each name out by hand. We didn't know you could build agroup of addresses. I sent [product information] to an organizationI was a member of, giving them a notice about technology that hadbecome commercially available, as opposed to a lot of thesee-mails, which are a shot in the dark. Of course, some people makea fortune out of that.
Presumably, there are some decententrepreneurs who want to use spam for good, not evil. Any adviceon using spam correctly?
Thuerk: It's worth theeffort to find the target audience rather than sending it toeverybody in the world, because you'll have a more respectableimage. And I tell people on the other side to delete all forwardingaddresses in e-mails. Because while you might be forwarding it tosome trustworthy people, eventually it's going to get into thewrong hands.
So do people give you death threats ordirty looks when they learn you started it all?
Thuerk: At a trade showrecently, one guy introduced me to someone as the Father of Spam. Iended up autographing stuff and taking pictures with people. Theyasked, "What was it like? What did you do?" A bit ofcelebrity has entered my life.
Geoff Williams is a writer in Loveland, Ohio. He can becontacted at gwilliams1@cinci.rr.com.
