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Why is junk email called spam?
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| Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam |
I would like to know why people started calling junk email spam, asks Sarah from Petts Wood.
Simon says ... What have the Monty Python team ever done for us? The answer is to give us the word we now use for unsolicited junk or bulk email.
The canned meat called spam (spiced ham) was immortalised in a famous Monty Python sketch which featured a couple, Mr and Mrs Bun (Eric Idle and Graham Chapman), trying to order in a cafe populated by Vikings. The couple found the menu contained nothing but spam dishes.
The word spam actually crops up 86 times during the sketch (compared to the word Bromley, which crops up once!) and the waitress's outburst of: "You mean spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, and spam?" made the word synonymous with repetition.
Perhaps there is no connection between Monty Python fans and computer geeks, but the word spam has since become the common word for junk email or mass emails which are sent out in bulk.
From what I can gather, the first computer-related uses of the word came about in the 1980s in early chat systems.
The term spamming got used for a few different actions, from flooding the computer with so much data that it crashed to flooding a chat session with a bunch of text inserted by a program (commonly called a 'bot' today). Other spamming involved inserting a file instead of real-time typing or having a program create a huge number of objects for early virtual multi-user environments rather then creating them by hand.
Other reports claim the term spam came about in early chatrooms when some users would annoy others by dumping the words to the Monty Python Spam Song.
The term spam really caught on in the 1990s when two US lawyers got hold of a script which allowed them to send an ad out promoting their services to thousands of newsgroups at once.
Whatever the true origin of spam, whoever invented the ability to send junk mail over the internet has a lot to answer for.
Do you think Simon's got this answer wrong? Click here to email him what you think the answer should be.
2:51pm Friday 28th May 2004
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