The Origin of Junk Mail

In recent days I've seen several news reports about spam or junk mail. It's an element in our work as writers and editors and others in publishing. I know many people have spam filters. I will see it when I send them an email response to their question on Right-Writing.com. I have to fill out a form on their spam filter in order to get my response returned to them (an understandable nuisance--yet still a nuisance in my view).

Over the weekend, I was in Houston, Texas for the Texas Christian Writers event at First Baptist Houston. When I returned home I found the August 6th issue of The New Yorker. It includes an article about spam called Damn Spam, A hundred billion junk e-mails a day. If you want to know about the origins of electronic junk mail, read this article.