I do believe in my humble opinion that 1969 was a good year for spam because at least twice a week I get get some piece of unwanted email dated from 1969 into my Mozilla Thunderbird email client.

Now I am far from being a computer programming guru, but it does seem to me that a good spam filter might just give pause to an email that was apparently sent before the internet was available. I could be wrong.

Okay, so after a brief Google it appears that an email could have been sent as early as 1969. But then the bigger picture, why after all of these years of prolific spam issues has nothing been done to stop it?

Spam will cost the world $50 billion in lost productivity and other expenses, according to Information Week (2/05). Just think of how many spams you get per day, 25% maybe 30%? That's 30% more capacity that every business must build into their network just to handle the volume of spam.

There are some things that even small businesses and normal people can do to fight the spam. Setup a free gmail account with Google. Forward all of your "incomming email" from your normal email account into gmail and then forward all of gmail's filtered results back to your usual desktop client. Then make sure you run a good desktop spam filter. Mozilla Thunderbird has an adaptive (learning) filter, but I don't like that I cannot go into the individual filter settings and fine turn them.