Happy 35th Birthday, Spam! And RIP, Hotmail.

Internet’s biggest plague, the Spam mail, celebrates its 35th birthday today. The first spam mail is attributed to marketer Gary Thuerk, who on May 3, 1978 sent a mail to 393 people in order to promote a new computer model DECSYSTEM-20 from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). ARPAnet (precursor to the internet) users totally condemned this move, but the marketer was successful in selling a couple of computers, which only motivated other spammers to follow suit. From then till now, the same motivation is driving the spammers who suck a substantial amount of bandwidth with their millions of mails, but at least now we’ve better anti-spam softwares to deal with the issue.

hotmail to outlook

In another email-milestone, Microsoft finally plucked the last flutter off its standby email service Hotmail having migrated its complete database to Outlook.com. Group Program Manager for Outlook, Dick Craddock announced today that around 300 million Hotmail accounts have found a new residence in Outlook, following an ‘incredible’ and ‘unprecedented’ process. Microsoft has officially retired from the domain hotmail.com, and entering it in your browser’s address bar shall only redirect you to the new Outlook.com page.

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