[Keyboard Cowboy]

Look up in the dictionary, and we SPAM listed as :-

1. A trademark used for a canned meat product consisting primarily of chopped pork pressed into a loaf.
2. To send unsolicited e-mail to.
3. To send (a message) indiscriminately to multiple mailing lists, individuals, or newsgroups.

What was the origins that linked up the canned meat product up with unsolicited e-mail?

[Qiranworms]

From http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamterm.html
(this is why I love Google )

In 1993, Richard Depew tried to make some changes in USENET. He advanced a somewhat controversial idea called retro-moderation, where newsgroups would be semi-moderated (that is to say, regulated so that not all postings would appear) through a moderator who canceled postings that broke the rules.

Moderated groups were common, but with those, each posting was pre-screened by the moderator. He suggested allowing a moderator to screen after the fact. Because this was new, and reminded people of censorship (since canceling the postings of others was normally a major faux pas), this was quite controversial. Depew got his own fan group, and both allies and detractors.

However, what really got people upset was March 31, 1993. He had been playing with some software to perform the retro-moderation task. His software, called ARMM, had a bug, and he ran it, and it ended up posting 200 messages in a row to news.admin.policy, the newsgroup where people discussed the running of the net. You can see an example here.

It really ticked people off, and some people, knowing the term from MUDs, called it a spam. The very day ARMM was run, Joel Furr, as far as I can tell, was the first to call a spam a spam.

Depew himself shortly apologized for having done a spam, using the term himself. However, many would say that this wasn't a true spam, since it was an accident.

[jaksback]

I would have thought that spam came from something that people don't like (even though i like spam the "meat")