The Rise of Email Marketing: From ARPANET to Permission
How email marketing grew from a 1978 experiment on ARPANET into a mainstream business practice by the end of 1999.
Email marketing didn’t start with a product launch or a company founding. It started in 1978, when a Digital Equipment Corporation marketer named Gary Thuerk sent a message announcing a new line of computers to roughly 400 addresses on ARPANET, the government-funded network that predated the internet. The message generated real sales and real complaints in roughly equal measure, and it’s still cited as the first documented piece of commercial email, more than a decade before anyone called it “email marketing.”
The 1980s and early 1990s: a niche practice
For most of the following fifteen years, sending mail to a list required specialized software and a network connection few businesses had. Tools like LISTSERV, developed in 1986, and later Majordomo let universities, technical communities and early online services manage mailing lists, but the audience was small and technical. Email marketing in any commercial sense barely existed outside of software companies and BBS-era hobbyist networks.
1993 to 1996: the term “spam” and the first real backlash
As commercial use of the early internet grew, so did unsolicited bulk email, and the community response was immediate. The term “spam,” borrowed from a Monty Python sketch, was applied to unwanted bulk postings on Usenet in the early 1990s and carried over to email as the practice spread. By the mid-1990s, watchdog efforts and blocklists aimed at bulk senders were already forming, years before any government regulation existed.
1996 to 1998: free webmail changes the audience
Hotmail’s 1996 launch, followed by its acquisition by Microsoft in 1997, put a free email address within reach of anyone with browser access, not just people with a workplace account or an ISP subscription. Yahoo and other portals followed with their own free webmail products. For the first time, businesses could reasonably assume a large share of consumers, not just early adopters, had an email address to reach.
1997 to 1998: the first organized pushback
As bulk email volume grew through the mid-1990s, so did organized resistance to it. The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email formed in 1997, advocating for legal limits on bulk email years before any state passed a law addressing it directly. Around the same time, informal blocklists run by volunteer administrators started giving mail server operators a practical way to refuse mail from known bulk senders, a crude precursor to the automated filtering systems that would mature over the following decade.
1999: permission becomes the argument
The year closed with the publication of Seth Godin’s “Permission Marketing” in May 1999, a book that put a name and a business case behind what practitioners had already been learning: mail sent to people who asked for it performed better, on every metric anyone could measure, than mail sent to people who didn’t. At the same time, states including Washington were moving toward the first anti-spam statutes in the country, years ahead of any federal law.
By the close of 1999, email marketing had moved from an experiment run by a handful of technical operators into a practice that ordinary businesses, from local retailers to growing software companies, were expected to understand. The tools were still primitive by later standards, largely plain text, manually managed lists and unreliable tracking, but the core argument that would define the next decade of the channel, that permission and relevance beat volume, was already settled.
