All About Spam
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by
Elena Fawkner
Spam.
It's the bane of anyone who conducts business online. It's becoming such a major
headache that law-makers the world over are struggling to legislate it out of
existence, alas without much success. For the time being at least, it's here to
stay, so let's take a look at the dreaded stuff -- what it is, what it isn't,
what you can do about it and how to avoid doing it yourself.
What
It Is
What
it is, is the registered trademark of the Hormel Foods Corporation (see http://www.spam.com).
It's canned meat, very popular with the military so I understand.
In
an Internet context, spam is either a single article posted repeatedly to large
number of Usenet newsgroups or email sent to a large number of addresses. In its
previous incarnation, for an email to be spam it had to be sent in large quantities.
That was the key characteristic. Now, of course, the definition has broadened
and the focus has shifted from one of quantity to one of recipient consent, more
particularly the lack thereof, regardless of the number of recipients.
The
term "spam" comes from a famous Monty Python sketch. As explained by
Hormel Foods itself: "Use of the term "SPAM" [in the Internet context]
was adopted as a result of the Monty Python skit in which a group of Vikings sang
a chorus of "SPAM, SPAM, SPAM ..." in an increasing crescendo, drowning
out other conversation. Hence, the analogy applied because UCE [unsolicited commercial
email] was drowning out normal discourse on the Internet." For the rest of
spam.com's interesting position statement on the use of its trademark in this
fashion, see http://www.spam.com/ci/ci_in.htm.
A good spam analogy is the unsolicited telemarketing calls that invariably come
when you're in the middle of dinner. The difference between spammers and telemarketers,
however, is that telemarketers don't have the gall to expect you to pay to receive
the call (other than in terms of your time). The spammer, on the other hand, does
indeed have the gall, and in spades. The generally accepted current definition
of spam encompasses six categories of email.
