Spam History: I was there (sorta)

I've been around long enough to have been mentioned in passing in Wikipedia's "History of email spam" entry. I am indeed the "Al Iverson of Radparker" who created one of the early anti-spam blocklists in an attempt to help folks block unwanted spam from "open relaying" mail servers.

I was definitely not THE first blocklist creator. But for a time, I did end up going to work for the "Mail Abuse Prevention System" folks, who did create the first blocklist, called the MAPS RBL (Realtime Blocklist List). MAPS' whole shtick was to beg people to sue them so that legal precedents could be set, helping to outlaw unsolicited commercial email, aka spam.

It was a bad plan.