What is Spam?

Definition. The origin of the term spam comes from a sketch by the British comedy troupe Monty Python. They did a bit on a restaurant where all the dishes cooked with SPAM (an acronym for Shoulder of Pork and Ham), which is a canned ham product from Hormel Foods Corporation. When the waitress describes items on the menu to a couple of customers landed from above, a group of Vikings sing a song that goes something like "SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM. Lovely SPAM, lovely SPAM..." So spam was thus named because, like the song, it is an endless repetition of worthless text.

Nowadays the lowercase word spam relates either to unsolicited bulk or commercial email and has nothing to do with the compressed ham in a can called and written as SPAM. There is fairly widespread agreement what spam general characteristics are:

• Spam is an electronic message.
• Spam is unsolicited. To understand that, refer to the electronic subscription thing. Many reputable companies use emails for lawful marketing purposes. If you agree to receive emails from a company by means of a voluntary subscription, the emails the company sends you is not spam. More than that if you do not want to be on the mailing list of the company any longer you can unsubscribe without a problem.
• Spam is sent in bulk. This means that the spam is distributed by a large number of essentially identical messages and that recipients are chosen indiscriminately.

These three traits define unsolicited bulk email (UBE)

If to add the fourth characteristic:

• Spam is of a commercial nature.

That defines unsolicited commercial email (UCE).

Spam categories:

• Commercial advertising. That is spam that follows any commercial intention or UCE. UCE is a kind of marketing too, rather cheap and easy way to cover a large group of customers. Usually UCEs are not sent by the advertising companies themselves, but by spammers, who receive commissions from these companies.
• Non-commercial advertising. That can be political or religious propaganda without a commercial context at all.
• Fraud and phishing. Often spammers send fraudulent emails, for instance, think out a pathetic and tragic story where a person suffering from a disease or who is a victim of a disaster appeals to you for financial help; inform you about a lotto winning demanding to pay a service charge first. A particular type of fraud is phishing - emails that appear to be from a well-known company, but they are not. The aim of such emails is to obtain user financial information or passwords.
• Hoaxes and chain e-mails. Such spam emails are sent to trick people into believing false information with a recommendation or an appeal to forward them to as many people as possible. That can be warning against viruses, misinformation about social events or even a dodge that makes you visit a web page and after that malicious software will be installed on your computer.
• Joe jobs. These are unsolicited emails with irritating, immoral or abusive content sent by a spammer who forges the From: field address and provokes angry recipients into flooding an innocent sender with complaints.
• Bounce messages. These are messages that are returned to senders by a receiving e-mail server in case it gets undeliverable addresses. Spammers distribute such undeliverable messages forging the From: field address and servers return bounces messages to innocent people in response to emails they have never actually sent. Bounce messages are not themselves spam but due to spammer tricks they become a significant part of email traffic.

Terminology. Two terms are commonly used to classify emails with a view to the spam problem:

• junk email - a message that comes under the spam definitions stated above;
• legitimate email - a message that is received from a trusted and known sender or the one you gave agreement to be sent to.