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Summer 2004

We're sorry to announce that one of the Internet's first spam research archives, Spam Central is now closed.

A few people didn't understand our disclaimer that spams we show were being displayed strictly for research and entertainment value. These messages that we received several years ago helped demonstrate the kinds of spam common at that time, and also demonstrate that many of the spammers techniques go unchanged.

Spam Central also developed to test the claim "no one has any interest in these kinds of things" that anti-spam activitist often make. So we placed a random selection of old messages online, with disclaimers, to see if people really search for the kind of information found in spam messages. It turns out that people really do search for this kind of information. It's part of the reason that spam is so hard to stamp out. Unfortunately the subject matter of spam often does appeal to the desires and interests of many people. One man's spam is another man's "Oops I deleted that, I really wanted to keep that".

We hoped that by flagging the messages here as spam, we were removing all doubt from any one who wondered about their own emails, whether a particular message was really spam. This educational research was many people's first clue that a particular message they'd just seen for the first time was really an old piece of recycled spam.

We tried to make it clear that we were also victims of these messages, we were not promoting these messages. Over the years, quite a number of people write to us and thanked us for outing these messages as spam.

However, certain search engines apparently feel that to have these kinds of messages displayed on the web should cause the entire website to be banned from their index. We are sorry that they have taken this view to censor the internet, but in an effort to be good citizens according to their dictates, we have removed this feature.

Again we would like to make it clear that we do not condone spam in any form. We always have, and always will, continue to advise our clients and contacts against sending spam in any form.

For many years we have been on the forefront of education about spam, sponsoring articles such as Email Marketing Tips - Want to use email marketing? Do it responsibly and drammatically increase your response rates.

If you desire to see the messages we had posted, you might be able to research them at Archive.ORG, or the Way Back Machine.