Happy birthday, spam! Do you mind if we don’t celebrate?

The other day, I got an email advertising ‘miracle’ weight loss. You know the sort: English as defined by Boggle and no way on earth that anyone would ever buy the product in question. I opened it without thinking, and was redirected to a blank page. Within minutes, my Hotmail, Twitter and WordPress accounts had gone haywire; I stared at my computer screen as the original message replicated itself and fired off to every single one of my contacts. My groan lasted about 20 minutes: why, I asked myself, would anyone bother doing this to me?

It turned out I’d been hacked on a convenient anniversary. In April 1994, two American lawyers called Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel sent out the first ever commercial spam message. It was an advert for their help registering for a ‘Green Card Lottery’ — a sort of lucky dip for US residency. The message, posted on a Usenet discussion forum, was read millions of times but cost only a tiny amount to send. In the space of a hundred words, Canter and Siegel had redefined the word ‘annoying’ for the 21st century.

These days, spam never stops. But who can be so desperate for online gaming, simulated sex or Viagra that they’re taken in?

The answer is: practically no one. A spammer who sends out 35 million emails in a month can expect around 20 sales of whatever it is they’re advertising. The numbers are massive, and as email services improve their defences, the reward is increasingly pitiful. On the other hand, the costs are practically nothing, too: a million email addresses can go for about $20. And if you’re in, say, Romania, a country where the cost of living is small and IT training readily available, then you could end up quids in.