Spamming is the process of sending unwanted electronic messages.
The most common form of spam is Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE) or Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE), the electronic form of junk mail.
A spammer will send identical or nearly identical messages to a large number of
email addresses, often harvested from
Usenet postings or web pages, or obtained from databases, without the permission of the recipients.
Most internet users frown upon spammers and sending spam is often against the AUP (Acceptable Use Policy) of your
ISP and as such may lead to their termination of your account.
The term is also used for sending unwanted advertising email to Usenet Newsgroups.
The name 'spam' is derived from the
Monty Python SPAM sketch, which takes place in a cafe where everything on the menu includes
SPAM luncheon meat, which the customer does not find appealing. As the server reads the menu, a group of people dressed as Vikings begin to sing "SPAM, SPAM, wonderful SPAM, glorious SPAM," drowning out legitimate conversation much as UCE does on the Internet.
An alternate theory of origin is that it's actually an acronym, which stands for: Stuff Posing As Mail
Most spammers send their UCE through 'Open Mail Relays'.
The SMTP system, used to send email across the Internet, forwards mail from one server to another; mail servers that ISPs run commonly require some form of authentication? that the user is a customer of that ISP.
Open relays, however, do not properly check who is using the mail server and pass all mail to the destination address, making it quite a bit harder to track down spammers.
"Official" views on spamming can be found in [RFC 2635].
The term "spamming" in multiplayer first-person shooters such as [Tribes 2]? refers to launching explosive munitions into the opponent's base or into any other area where a player's opponents congregate. In some games "spamming" also applies to one's own team.
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