By Michael Bloch
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.
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Michael is an Australian Information Technologies
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