What is Spam?

By Michael Bloch
Posted Tuesday, November 23, 2004

spam: noun

Spam is unsolicited e-mail on the Internet. From the sender's point-of-view, it's a form of bulk mail, often to a list culled from subscribers to a Usenet discussion group or obtained by companies that specialize in creating e-mail distribution lists.

To the receiver, it usually seems like junk e-mail. In general, it's not considered good netiquette to send spam. It's generally equivalent to unsolicited phone marketing calls except that the user pays for part of the message since everyone shares the cost of maintaining the Internet.

Some apparently unsolicited e-mail is, in fact, e-mail people agreed to receive when they registered with a site and checked a box agreeing to receive postings about particular products or interests. This is known as both opt-in e-mail and permission-based e-mail.

Spam also bogs down the internet with unneccessary transactions to the point that I have seen it crash servers that have to deal with literally thousands of junk messages flooding them all at once.

A first-hand report indicates that the term is derived from a famous Monty Python sketch ("Well, we have Spam, tomato & Spam, egg & Spam, Egg, bacon & Spam...") that was current when spam first began arriving on the Internet. Spam is a trademarked Hormel meat product that was well-known in the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II.

Michael Bloch

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About the Author
Michael is an Australian Information Technologies trainer and web developer. Many other free web design, ecommerce development and Internet articles, tutorials, tools and resources are available from his award winning site; Web Marketing, eCommerce & Development solutions.Taming the Beast.net (http://www.tamingthebeast.net) michael@tamingthebeast.net