Happy Anniversary Spam!

Ever wonder where spam (electronic) started? Or why it started? Or what the benefits of spam emails are? Well, this weekend marks spam's 30th anniversary!

Here are the Spam facts that you've always wanted to know, but been too afraid to ask:

• The first spam email was sent out May 3, 1978
• In 1993 it won the name of spam...not to be confused with the food spam
• Statistics gathered by the FBI suggest that 75% of net scams snare people through junk e-mail. In 2007 these cons netted criminals more than $239m .
• 100 billion spam messages are sent every day
• Spam isn't just thru email now; it's thru instant messaging, fax, twitter, blog comments, myspace, etc. Spam certainly has moved up in the world....or has it...?

I want to give a big shout out to Spam Filters. Without them, we'd be inundated with even more spam than we get already. Way to go SP!

I love snopes.com; a GREAT site to put in a keyword to see if an email you got is actually real or spam. Plus, it's always fun to reply to someone's "A prayer chain for an 11-year old with cancer" email with "Hey -- this email is fake, I just found it here on snopes."