That Spam in Your Mailbox? It May Be From MeBy GEORGE JOHNSON

"The demon's urgent missives began trickling and then pouring into my mailbox: "Failure notice," "Undeliverable," "Mail System Error — Returned Mail." At Internet service providers around the world, software robots (called "mailer-demon") were rejecting hundreds of e-mail messages with bad addresses and bouncing them to me.
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Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of spam, according to a Web page by Brad Templeton, a software entrepreneur and chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In 1978, he reports, users of the fledgling Internet (then called Arpanet) received an unsolicited electronic mailing announcing an open house to demonstrate a new computer." [more]