PHOENIX, April 12 (UPI) -- Monday marked the 10th anniversary of the term "spam," coined after an Arizona attorney sent a message to advertise his practice on the Internet.
The message from Laurence Canter on April 12, 1994, to increase business for his firm, Canter & Siegel, flooded online message boards angering many, CNET reported on its Web site.
Thousands who received the advertising message were not happy and one Usenet user wrote, "Send coconuts and cans of Spam to Cantor & Co."
Ever since, the term spam has been used to describe unsolicited mass Internet advertising.
Canter said his ad was a success, bringing in between $100,000 and $200,000 in business.
Analysts said there was spam before April 12, 1994 -- it just wasn't called spam.
Despite lawsuits and legislation to curb the unsolicited advertising, Postini, a Redwood City, Calif.-based e-mail management provider, said spam made up about 77 percent of the nearly 5 billion e-mails through its system in March -- up a point from February.
