Why Do We Call It Spam?

Email spam is pretty ubiquitous. We've even written an article about how spam is even possible.

But why do we call it spam—that’s quite a silly name? Like most things silly, the answer starts with Monty Python.

The term traces back to a Monty Python sketch from the 1970s. Set in a greasy spoon cafe, the premise of the sketch is simple: every item on the menu contains Spam, the meat product, often more than once, with the lone exception of a truffled Lobster Thermidor. Orders come in for things like "Spam, egg, sausage, and Spam" (which doesn't have much Spam in it). So that's the joke. They say “Spam” a lot, so much so that it overwhelms the entire sketch.

Early internet users did not immediately call unwanted email “spam.” At first, it was just “junk mail” as seen in 1975's RFC 706, which discussed how there was no mechanism for early ARPANET users to decline unwanted messages.

The first instance of what we now classify as spam happened in 1978, when a Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) staffer sent an unsolicited advertisement to every ARPANET address on the West Coast inviting them to a seminar. This was pretty poorly received by users, but sources suggest that this campaign reportedly generated $13 million in revenue after sending only a few hundred emails—so he would probably say it was worth it.

The etymology of spam referring to emails is an interesting one, and one that requires a bit of internet archaeology. Many point to a 1993 post on Usenet, a decentralized discussion system that was very popular in the early internet and still maintains a niche today. While testing moderation software, a user named Richard Depew accidentally posted hundreds of duplicate messages to a popular Usenet group. This was unpopular, and some people used the term "spam" to describe the error. Oh, and others called him a dickwad.

Even before Usenet, the term had already gained some popularity in Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and Multi-User Dungeons (MUDS), which were basically big online spaces that featured text communication, discussion, chatrooms, sometimes games, and that kind of stuff. In these spaces, people quickly discovered that repeatedly posting nonsense was an excellent way to annoy everyone else and derail conversation. Just like the Monty Python sketch that bombarded users with the word "Spam," flooding conversations with noise eventually became known as "spamming."

“Spamming was flooding a chat room with clutter. In the bandwidth-constrained, text-only space, this was a powerful tool for annoying people.”
— Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet

The term entered the mainstream in 1994 with the first large-scale instance of commercial spamming. Lawyers Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel paid to write a program to advertise their green card services across thousands of Usenet groups. It was one of the first large-scale commercial spam campaigns, and people didn't like it. Users quickly labeled the posts "spam," and the term became synonymous with unwanted communication. The original post and people's unhappy responses are still available in the Usenet archives.

As a fun footnote, Canter and Siegel later wrote a book, How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway: Everyone's Guerrilla Guide to Marketing on the Internet and Other On-Line Services, explaining how to use shady marketing practices on the nascent internet. Then they got disbarred for their behavior. Win some, lose some, I guess.

In 1998, the Oxford Dictionary included the term “spam” as a definition for junk email. And the rest, as they say, is history.