Spam

1. A spiced canned ham product from the [Hormel Foods]? company that has entered into folklore. SPAM luncheon meat is also used as a artistic medium in Spam carving contests.

Various explanations of the origin of the SPAM name include "SPiced hAM" and "Spiced Pork And haM"; the current official expansion is "Specially Processed Assorted Meat" as the SPAM Lite variety contains both pork and chicken meat. According to [Hormel's trademark guidelines], you should spell SPAM with all capital letters and treat the mark as an adjective, following it with a more generic descriptor, for example "SPAM luncheon meat".

2. Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE) or Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE), commonly known as 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 luncheon meat--and which unsurprisingly the customer doesn't want.

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]. Hormel Foods's information about the SPAM trademark can be found on [this page].