It seems pretty obvious that there was junk mail in earlier times because mail was pretty much the same then as now; why wouldn’t it exist? I think what is more interesting (and more analogous to “spam”) was junk telegrams. In 1864, a London dentist spammed numerous MPs with advertisements by telegram. Of course the beauty of it was that the spamming itself became newsworthy given the recipients and the dentists got free advertising in the newspaper articles condemning their actions.
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