>What do "SPAM", "SPAMMER", SPAMMING", etc stand for?
From:"DRAFT FAQ: Advertising on Usenet: How To Do It, How Not To Do It".
(I'd further clarify this explanation by saying that smapping generally involves
sending your message/advert to unrelated discussion groups, i.e. sending
offers of maps to this list).
>Spamming is defined as posting identical or nearly-identical ads to a lot
>of newsgroups, one right after the other. Since it's really not that
>difficult to write a program that will post the same advertisement to
>dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of newsgroups, a lot of people have
>taken to doing this.
>
>What's happened to people who've spammed?
>
>They've lost their accounts, been mail-bombed (had thousands of pieces of
>junk email sent to them), had people call up and yell at them in the
>middle of the night, had people forward their mail (by this I mean MAIL
>mail, not email) to someplace strange, had people sign them up for
>thousands of unwanted magazine subscriptions, had people send them
>thousands of pages of condemnatory faxes, and so forth.
>
>*Nothing* is as hated on Usenet as spamming. It's extremely, unbelievably
>rude and if you do it, you *will* come to regret it. This is not a threat
>-- it's an observation. Any benefits spamming might have brought you will
>be more than counteracted by the intense public outcry against you in
>every newsgroup you posted your ad to.
>
>Some members of the media have gotten the mistaken impression that
>spamming is hated because it's *advertising*. It's true that Usenet
>readers don't have much fondness for advertising, but the real reason
>spamming is hated so much is because it's unbelievably *rude*. Each copy
>of the ad takes up disk space on thousands of machines around the world --
>and if you post the ad 1000 times, that's millions of copies of your
>message that *you* are making other people pay to store copies of. When
>you spam, you're hogging hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of other
>people's storage space.
[snip]
>Finally, if you're wondering where the term "spamming" came from, it came
>from a Monty Python sketch in which the characters were in a restaurant
>which mainly sold spam. Items on the menu included things like "spam,
>spam, spam, eggs, ham, and spam." Whenever the waitress recited the menu,
>a group of Vikings in the corner would chime in with her, chanting the
>word "spam" over and over, drowning out everything else. Some members of
>the media have spread the explanation that the word "spamming" derives
>from throwing chunks of spam into a fan. This is not the case.
Simon
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Simon J. Coles Email: [log in to unmask]
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