Spam

1. A spiced canned ham product from the Hormel company that has entered into folklore. Also used as a artistic medium in Spam carving contests.

2. Spam is 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, where everything on the cafe menu includes spam - and which unsurprisingly the customer doesn't want.

The problem of sending spam is made worse by 'Open Mail Relays'. Email servers on the internet will forward email from one place to another, so called 'Open Relays' do not properly check who is using the relaying facility and make finding the spammers harder,while making their lives cheaper and easier.

Spam is also known as 'Unsolicited Bulk Email' or 'Unsolicited Commercial Email'. "Official" views on spamming can be found in RFC 2635.