An infected Word document was posted to the alt.sex usenet newsgroup on March 26 1999. It forwarded itself to the first 50 people in your Microsoft Outlook address book. The virus occasionally corrupted documents by inserting the phrase twenty-two, plus triple-word-score, plus fifty points for using all my letters. Im outta here. The virus was the first one of the first* successful email-aware viruses, forcing some large companies to shut down their email gateways because of the colossal amount of email the malware was generating.”]
Source: https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2009/03/26/memories-melissa-virus/