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Spam refers to emails and other digital messages sent in bulk and, most importantly, unsolicited. These messages are usually promotional in nature.

The term likely originated during World War II and comes from the canned meat product “Spiced Ham,” introduced in 1936, which prominently displayed the letters “SPAM” on its label. During the war, food was rationed in the UK, but Spam was available everywhere and could be found in nearly every shop. A sketch from the comedy show Monty Python’s Flying Circus further cemented the term in the public’s mind. In the sketch, a café’s menu consists almost entirely of Spam dishes, and whenever someone says “Spam,” a chorus of Vikings bursts into song, chanting “Spam” over and over.

The term “spam” was first used in the digital realm in early multiplayer text-based games known as Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs), which emerged in the 1970s. It described users flooding the chat with repetitive messages.

The first spam email wasn’t originally labeled as such. It was an advertisement for a new computer from the Digital Equipment Corporation and was sent over ARPANET by Gary Thuerk in 1978. His assistant, Carl Gartley, sent the message to 393 recipients - at a time when it was still customary to write individual emails for each recipient. The reaction was overwhelmingly negative. The first known electronic chain letter came in 1988, titled “Make Money Fast.” It was nothing more than a pyramid scheme benefiting only the original sender.

In 1994, attorneys Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel used software to mass-post messages to Usenet newsgroups, a move now known as the “Green Card Spam.” These messages advertised a U.S. Green Card lottery targeting non-U.S. citizens. The message was sent to 5,500 users, and the couple later founded a company, Cybersell, offering “spam for hire.”

To this day, email remains the most common form of spam. A defining trait of spam emails is that they are unsolicited. Within email spam, we differentiate between bulk emails, commercial spam, and so-called “collateral spam” or “backscatter.”

• Bulk emails are sent to large numbers of recipients and are often part of marketing campaigns but can also have political or religious motives.
• Commercial spam targets individual users and often contains questionable product or service offers, such as unsolicited ads for potency pills or illegal gambling websites.
• Collateral spam (backscatter) involves emails with forged sender addresses being sent to unrelated third parties, often with malicious links.

There are also non-email forms of spam, such as phone spam. This includes:

• Ping calls that ring once and entice the recipient to call back - often to a premium-rate number.
• Unsolicited SMS, which can include scams or malware links.

Link spam is a now-deprecated SEO technique. It used to be common to manipulate Google’s search rankings by creating lots of links pointing to a site. The logic: if many links lead to a page, it must be relevant. Spammers artificially inflated link counts via spammy link farms or dummy pages. Google now detects and penalizes such behavior.

Even social networks aren’t immune to spam. Spammers use search features to target specific groups with messages or friend requests, often containing pornographic links, ads, or malware. So it’s always wise to stay vigilant.