Yes, Spam, is the name for that little blue can of processed “meat” made by Hormel you can find in the grocery store. The meat is junk, which is fitting, but I’m not sure if that’s the source of the word we’ve grown so fond of. Actually, the generally accepted derivation for the word is a Monty Python skit. They had a skit in which a group of Vikings were singing “spam, spam, spam, spam” so loud and often that it drowned everyone out. In the early days of the internet, when the net was mostly populated by nerds of the classical sense, there were very few net surfers who didn’t appreciate Monty Python, so I guess the word caught on and I can see the correlation.

When we hear the word SPAM, our first thought is unsolicited junk mail. For most practical purposes, this covers it. But, some have simply defined it as “unsolicited email”. This is an incomplete definition simply because most of us get emails every day we didn’t directly ask for. It’s simply not plausible for each of us to give people a call and say “Hey, send me an email.”. It’s silly. Others have said SPAM is email coming from an unknown source. Again, this is incomplete because people receive emails every day from people they do not know. If I only accepted emails from people I knew, then anybody reading this book or visiting PC Mechanic at all could never email me. What most people mean when they think of SPAM is simply annoying email. If they find the email annoying in some fashion, then its SPAM. This definition gets a little closer, but it still left to the preference and mood of the recipient and, for this reason, is not a very useful definition. For example, PC Mechanic sends out a Tip of the Day every day. There are always a few people who say we are spamming them and they take themselves off the mailing list. There is nobody on our mailing list who did not directly sign themselves up for it. Therefore, it not unsolicited at all, but that particular day they found our Tip of the Day annoying and therefore, to them, it is SPAM. Again, a very useless definition. How about “unsolicited bulk email” as a definition? Close, but again there are caveats. If I receive an email from my bank or some other company who provides a service to me, then chances are the email is unsolicited. I didn’t ask them to send me emails. But, at the same time, I have a business relationship with them and therefore it is reasonable that I would receive occasional emails from them.

Get the point? Determining whether an email is SPAM or not is a gray area and is, to large degree, in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps the most accurate definition would be “unethical mass email”. Ethics is that effort on each person’s part to perform the most good for the most number. So, on the reverse side of this, if you have a mass email which offends the ethical sense or netiquette of a majority of internet users, it is probably SPAM. Therefore, any email sent individually to a person is not SPAM; it is not a mass email. But, a commercial email (one advertising a product or service) can be if it does the following:

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