Spam is less of a problem now than it has been in the past, and with a few precautions, it can be avoided entirely.

It's true that spam first popped up on Usenet and became such a problem that the term 'spam' was created by the Usenet community to describe unsolicited commercial messages. To understand the current prevalence of spam we should examine its history.

The first instance of a post being called 'spam' actually came from an accidental spamming incident. In 1993, while testing moderation software, a Usenet administrator sent over 200 consecutive articles to news.admin.policy. Participants recognized this flood as spam, a slang term used for similar floods on BBS networks.

The first major spam on Usenet came in 1994. A university sysadmin created a religious-themed message and cross-posted it to every newsgroup that existed at the time. Besides showing how easily Usenet could be spammed, this incident frustrated readers only temporarily.

The most infamous act of Usenet spam occurred a few months later, in April of 1994. Two lawyers, known as Canter and Siegel, posted an article entitled "Green Card Lottery – Final One?" to every newsgroup. The article was posted with the aid of a Perl script which made cross-posting (and reposting at a later time) trivial.

The Canter and Siegel spam marked a change on Usenet because the lawyers were unaffected by complaints made by other Usenet participants. They continued spamming and even attempted business ventures where they would teach such 'marketing techniques' to anyone willing to pay.

Since the time of Canter and Siegel, spam has become a common issue when communicating online, in any medium. Today, Usenet spam is combated in a number of ways, many of them at the news server level. Ironically, the techniques used to create the first accidental Usenet spam have been refined to the point where they are responsible for much of the cancelling and blocking of Usenet spam today.