There were only a few hundred people on the list, but that was enough for Thuerk to claim the mantle, 'Father of Spam.'
Gary Thuerk, a Marketing Manager at Digital Equipment Corp, sent the first commercial email years later, where the message reached a list of email addresses. Tomlinson also introduced the symbol in email addresses to the world. The email was sent from one computer to another, traveling through a network of machines not unlike the internet we know today. The message was nothing special, a series of numbers and letters that looked more like a password than a message, but its significance was profound. The first email, sent by Ray Tomlinson in 1971 or 1978 depending on your source, marked the beginning of the modern communication era. What is email marketing, and where did it begin?
