 Subject: I am in America - write to me, we'll meet.
The subject was maybe pleasing to the eye, but the message was definitely pleasing to the hormones: “We were talking on the forum, remember me? I am Maria from Russia!”
Normally, I don't really get a chance to read spam, because I'm a busy guy. Besides, whenever I try to move the cursor towards that folder, a scream from a friend of mine naturally follows, as if I am preventing John Locke from entering the numbers "4-8-15-16-23-42." But that very night, I finally got the chance to double click the spam-folder in a deserted BCC-Lab. And Maria's message made its way to my eyes, then to my heart, not very surprisingly. God knows how long she had waited there for me to come. Poor Maria. Ditto her spam.
In my opinion, to trace back to the first spam, it is necessary to understand the concept of e-mail first (there might be other ways too, but as I said, I'm a busy guy). Though Wikipedia insists that MIT was the first to use it, I personally don't agree with that. For me, it is more likely that Bill Gates ordered his engineers to create such a system, because he didn't own a mobile phone company and didn't want to spend money on one. And thanks to one of my friends who hacked his email account, I got to read the very first emails on earth, which was something like this:
From: bill666@[REDACTED]
To: melinda666@[REDACTED]
Subject: Hi
Message: What's for dinner?
From: melinda666@[REDACTED]
To: bill666@[REDACTED]
Subject: RE: Hi
Message: Broccoli.
From: bill666@[REDACTED]
To: melinda666@[REDACTED]
Subject: RE: Hi
Message: Aww! I have a meeting tonight.
After that, Bill decided not to use email anymore because his wife wasn't a huge fan of recipe books. He prepared a weekly schedule instead, which I've copy-and-pasted below verbatim:
Odd days: Broccoli
Even days: Peas
Then one day, a guy in Microsoft, probably one of those guys you can only see in sitcoms who always comes up with new-but-useless ideas, came to his office and said; "Hey! Let's send Mark from the Marketing Department a junk email and see if he falls for it and replies? Sounds fun, huh?" And this is how the process started. And like a spark resulting in a forest fire, that very first innocent joke led to the invasion of our cyber lives by spam. And by the forest, I mean a gigantic one, like the ones they have dauntlessly destroyed in James Cameron's Avatar, for which "more than 97% of all e-mails sent over the net are unwanted, according to a Microsoft security report," says Wikipedia.
The fact that most of the messages in your mailbox are actually spam sounds disappointing to me too, as someone who tends to use sentences like "Sorry, I'm busy." a lot. Not that I'm encouraging it, but the only thing funny about emails seems to be spam these days. Yes, I know Bilkenters love organizing seminars and letting us know that. And it's true that professors have a good sense of humor from time to time, especially when it comes to sending homework assignments via Bilkent Webmail. But as a wannabe economist, I can easily say that I will never have a sum of "($10,500,000.00) Ten Million Five Hundred Thousand United State of America Dollars" that "Juliet Komo" inherited from her father, transferred to my bank account, as promised by another spam email.
Plus, as spamming has been a vital marketing method, especially of bedroom life (from the 41 spam messages, I can tell), creativity has concurrently gained importance. Obviously, there are people living off the money they make from spamming. And again as a wannabe economist who cares about world matters (that is, I don't watch news), I wonder: Why would someone want to exacerbate the unemployment problem by trying to get rid of spam? Thus, I hit the Reply button and write to Maria:
“Sure I do, Maria. How have you been? Long time no see. Lol.”
(Coming Soon: My First Date With Maria)
By Cüneyt Yżlmaz ( ECON/II )
cuneyt_y@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
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