what is spam?
A famous sketch on Monty Python's Flying Circus is the unlikely source for this internet term. A couple are in a cafe for lunch. Everything on the menu has some spam in it, and some items have little else. The wife doesn't want any spam. She is have trouble explaining this to the waitress. At another table sits a group of vikings. They sing loudly about spam, eventually drowning out all conversation in the cafe.

In the early days of the internet, one of the most used applications was Usenet News. This is like a large collection of bulletin boards where people are engaged in tens of thousands of different discussions. Such a useful concept could not survive indefinitely, and soon people began posting lots of irrelevant messages (usually unrelated advertising) to newsgroups, effectively drowning out all constructive conversation. Some wit spotted the parallel between these idiots and Monty Python's vikings and so the notion of spam, spammers and spamming were born.

The internet grew in popularity and more and more people started using News, email, message boards and all the other communication tools that it gives us. The spammers followed. Today there is hardly any internet or web communication channel that isn't choking on spam.

spam.abuse.net defines spam as "flooding the internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it". It's like collect-call marketing, the recipient has to pay for it, and probably doesn't want it. In fact, spam is so unpopular that just to get a handful of replies, the sender will probably send tens of thousands of emails. These all use resources and the cost is ultimately passed on to the end-user.

Producs typically promoted through spam are porn, pyramid schemes, dodgy financial services, knockoff pharamceuticals, intimate surgery and (perhaps predictably) spam services!
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