SPAM is a ready to eat meat product that was originally produced by a company called Hormel Foods Corporation. The original SPAM is made from pork, but other variations have been made from other types of meat including turkey. The original name SPAM was picked out of a naming contest, and though the original meaning of the word was an amalgamation of the ingredients – “Shoulder of Pork and Ham” – there have been many alternate backyard names given to the name, such as “Something Posing As Meat”.

How did a food product become a technological definition for something bad? In an old Monty Python skit where a restaurant setting was used, customers had a choice from a menu containing a variety of items all derived from SPAM. The gist of the skit was that there was such an overwhelming presence of the item that the customers were sickened by the product and did not want to have anything to do with it. This particular skit was very popular, and recurring unsolicited posts on the internet on Usenet – an earlier version of today’s forums – gave birth to the reference. Whenever something was posted repeatedly and abusively it was referred to as SPAM, calling to memory that episode of the Monty Python show where the meat product was overused.

Hormel Foods eventually found out about the use of the word, but made no objections to it, their only request was that when referring to the internet article the word should be spelled in lower case to differentiate between the food product and the internet reference.

In regards to internet life spam is anything that is unwanted that repeatedly comes on your forums, bulletin boards or mail. Persons who have online or web-based email will notice that most if not all webmail providers have some kind of spam filtering enabled. What this does is check the title, the sending address or the content of the mail, or all mentioned criteria and mark it as spam based on keywords that may be contained in the areas searched. These methods help keep your regular mail free from clutter with multiple unwanted articles, and there is usually a “spam” button that allows you to tag messages that the built-in filter may have missed, and “not spam” for those that may have been incorrectly blocked. You can usually check for your incorrectly blocked messages in your “spam” folder.

In bulletin boards or forums spam may come in the form of persons or automated systems called “bots” that sign up and post the same or similar information repeatedly with links to particular websites. Website administrators have attempted to curb the action of bots by implementing systems that ask questions such as basic addition which bots usually cannot answer.

With your PC at home when not using webmail there are free and paid solutions for blocking spam but their functions are very similar to the aforementioned online filters, with installation of a third party program being the primary noticeable difference.