News > It Was 10 Years Ago This A.M., Green Card Lawyers Taught the World to Spam
Today is the anniversary of the original green card laywer spam on Usenet. If you weren't on the Internet back then, you wouldn't realize it, but the outrage was enormous. It was the first time Usenet had been spammed on a massive level. Today, it's routine.
Luckily, much of Usenet spam gets filtered out by newsadmins and is never seen. I remember the U.S Internet newsadmin (who knew that I posted to Usenet and maintained some FAQs) showed me the then-new spam filter he had installed. Even back then (1998 or so), the filter removed about a quarter of the posts on our news server.
Posted by lesjones